So-called “Bitcoin Cash” is neither Bitcoin, nor cash, in the sense that it has neither the unlinkability nor the fungibility of cash. It and its ilk are also generically different from honest altcoins, which at least have the decency to make their own names. I don’t even know what to properly call it—other than a scam, of course; and anybody who does not realize it’s a scam must be one or more of ill-informed, malicious, or incurably stupid.
That said, the automatic replacement of words in software is always a bad idea. The problems it creates make a “clbuttic” software failure category; moreover, that would mangle posts such as this one. See, I mentioned “so-called ‘Bitcoin Cash’”. In context, changing my words would destroy the meaning of what I said above; and I would be most displeased, on the principle that nobody has a right to change my words. You may delete them, yes, if I were to say something against forum rules; but never presume to put words in my mouth!
Yet the “free speech” arguments in this thread also fall flat. The self-styled “Bitcoin Cash” would be clear-cut trademark infringement, if Bitcoin had any owner or backing entity to enforce a trademark—which it fortunately does not. Try opening a burger joint, calling it “McDonald’s”, using a logo of slightly rotated double-arches, claiming outright to be “the real McDonald’s”—and then claiming that’s your “free speech”. See how far you get.
Now, I am not a fan of trademark law as it has been twisted to be. But this is not a matter of inadvertent vague similarity which looks like it may be slightly confusing, if you squint at it and try hard to be confused. Rather, so-called “Bitcoin Cash” is a textbook example of the precise theory on which the concept of trademark rests: It’s
wrong for scammy scammers to scam people by intentionally creating name confusion so as to leech off trust and goodwill. This obvious conceptual wrong is part of the reason why normal people tend to nod their heads when trademark lawyers talk, instead of strangling them with their own entrails. (The other part is that normal people are inept at catching the rhetorical tricks by which trademark lawyers expand that wrong to cover things quite dissimilar.)
Fortunately,
Bitcointalk.org already has a rule which ought obviate this whole discussion:
“14. All altcoin related discussion belong in the Alternate cryptocurrencies and it's [sic] child boards.” Despite my aforesaid discomfort with describing scamcoin “Bitcoin Cash” as an “alt”, moderator enforcement of this longstanding rule is perhaps the best all-around solution.
Moderators, when you see a post promoting “Bitcoin Cash”, please think:
Would I delete the post and/or sanction the user, if this were promoting ABCXYZCoin? In many forums, for most posts, the answer would be
yes. I suspect that this would solve much of the problem, especially in forums where newbies are most likely to be misled.
I hope that helps. As for myself, I am still having trouble deciding what I should call Roger Ver’s little abortion. Perhaps ASICBOOSTCOIN. Any better ideas? “We’re-not-engineers-don’t-know-much-about-scaling-and-don’t-care-Coin” is too long.
