A quote from a recent news article at bitcoin.com:

Over the course of the past twelve hours, the Bitcoin Cash (BCH) blockchain has been chugging along (…) The network is operating at 26% of the original chain’s difficulty as mining has become much easier on the BCH chain.

Can Bitcoin Cash be the savior of old ASIC miners and the rocketship that will boost the sales of new equipment? Equipment such as the Antminer S7, which can no longer mine BTC profitably, can easily be used once again to mine BCH. Network hashrate is 12× lower (5.088 Ehash/s for BTC vs 420.861 Phash/s for BCH on 3 August, according to https://bitinfocharts.com) yet difference in price between BTC and BCH is only about 7×. Bitcoin Cash uses different rules to adjust difficulty and initial difficulty has dropped to ~0.262, making mining 4× less difficult. Data is still scarce and changes will be coming, but I am almost tempted to buy a used miner and try to give it a second life.

So much for the short term. But the long term future also looks good for the new coin, doesn’t it?

Bitcoin Cash now offers what many people wanted for a long time: larger blocks, cheaper & faster transactions. If we agree with the pundits who say that Bitcoin is hot-wired to become a settlement currency and will be used by the big boys only, then BCH will have the chance to be “poor people’s” Bitcoin. So there will be still interest to mine BCH, right? And that will make Bitmain happy by doubling the amount of ASIC miners they will get to sell 🙂