Former Wall Street executive Michael Novogratz[1] weighed in on the Bitcoin (BTC) vs Bitcoin Cash (BCH) debate in a tweet[2] Saturday, May 5. Novogratz defended BTC’s status as the original cryptocurrency referred to in Satoshi Nakamoto’s 2008 whitepaper[3], and the true holder of the ‘Bitcoin’ brand.
Enough already. Bitcoin core is BTC. It is a store of value. It is digital gold. It’s market cap dwarfs bitcoin cash. If you want to be a payments currency by definition you need to have stable value. So why own it. ??
— Michael Novogratz (@novogratz)
Novogratz’s tweet was a reply to a May 4 post[5] from the Bitcoin Cash-promoting Twitter handle @Bitcoin. The @Bitcoin post claimed “Bitcoin Cash is the oldest cryptocurrency” and that “Bitcoin Core (BTC) is an experimental currency that does not have a white paper.”
In addition to defending the brand status of Bitcoin – confusingly referred to as Bitcoin Core, the name of its software client, by its detractors – Novogratz listed other perceived attributes of Bitcoin, taking a stab at Bitcoin Cash along the way: “[BTC] is a store of value. It is digital gold. It’s market cap dwarfs bitcoin cash [sic].”
Novogratz, named one of the richest people[6] in crypto earlier this year, fully entered the cryptocurrency market in 2015 after a lucrative 26-year career on Wall Street, both at Goldman Sachs and Fortress Investment Group. According to Bloomberg[7], Novogratz was able to raise $250 million for his new venture, the cryptocurrency merchant bank Galaxy Digital, even while cryptocurrency markets were collapsing from record highs[8] in December, 2017.
The debate of brand-legitimacy within the Bitcoin community erupted after
