So it appears bitcoin has won against its strongest nemesis as of yet, and quite convincingly too. Bitcoin Cash going back towards under $1000 whereas bitcoin reaching new heights surpassing 8K.
What do you think this means? And what actually triggered it?
From my humble point of view, the last weekend saw a "flip attack" on Bitcoin. A classic "coupe d'etat" (you always start them on the weekend when the government is out drinking...): convince enough people Bcash is the real Bitcoin and Bitcoin is a "legacy coin" and you have won.
The whales behind the Bcash pump probably did not have enough Bitcoins to dump Bitcoin and pump Bcash, and it seems the Korean exchanges where the prices were pumped shut down on Sunday in a critical phase of the attack (overload? DDos?). Seems Bitcoins were then moved to Bitfinex to continue the pump and dump there, but the faith in Bcash faded as it became clear who the people behind the pump are.
Background: Bitcoin and Bcash compete for hash computation resources from the miners. So if you pull away the miners from mining Bitcoin by paying them to do so and get them to mine Bcash, Bitcoin will stop working (transaction backlog and fees explode, transactions can fall to zero per hour, blockchain freezes), causing a panic: more and more speculators will sell Bitcoins and buy BCash, so the pump feeds itself.
This is a real issue in the long run: the higher the price of Bitcoin, the bigger the incentive to start a flip attack.
Right now the miners generate around USD 15 million per day in revenues from mining, plus some transaction fees on top.
Give them e.g. USD 40M per day and Bitcoin freezes and you can push your own forked chain as the real Bitcoin...