, the fourth largest crypto network by market capitalization, is halving in April. Yes, much like its bigger brother, the -forked cryptocurrency will be cutting the block rewards it dispenses to miners by 50%, from BCH 12.5 (USD 4,073) to BCH 6.25.
But according to a variety of industry players, Bitcoin Cash's halving may not have much of an effect on its price. Still, there's likely to be changes to Bitcoin Cash's hashrate, or the computing power of the network, as a result of its halving occurring before Bitcoin's, while the ongoing dispute over a potential 'developer tax' could magnify the longer term economic impact of the halving.
‘Dumb markets’
Is the Bitcoin Cash halving already priced in, or will it be priced in soon?
Bitcoin Cash developer Jonathan Toomim tells Cryptonews.com that predicting the cryptocurrency's likely price movements is a fool's errand.
"If the markets were rational, they would have already priced in the halving," he says. "However, the markets are dumb, reactionary, and whimsical, and I have no idea what they will do."
Even assuming the rationality of markets, Simon Dingle, a cryptocurrency analyst and author of "In Math We Trust," is fundamentally sceptical that the halving could have much of a positive effect on Bitcoin Cash's price.
"The decrease in supply only has a meaningful impact if there is sustainable or growing demand for the asset, and I can’t imagine BCH has much of either," says Dingle.
In an email to Cryptonews.com, Dingle describes Bitcoin Cash as "an interesting but otherwise obscure experiment in on-chain scaling that is yet to prove itself in any real way. It would be interesting if we found that a fat protocol was the way to scale a cryptocurrency, but everything we know from network science suggests it just won’t work."
'The looming split'
Other experts suspect that the halving will have a short-term positive effect on Bitcoin Cash's price. But at the same time, they worry that the over a proposed developer's tax could cancel out such an effect.
