Its authors, original funders, and most exchanges originally referred to it as "BCC" which was, unfortunately, also the symbol for the Bitconnect ponzi scheme.
"Bitcoin Cash" is both a mouthful and enabler of outright fraudulent behaviour, where people are sold BCH and think they got Bitcoin at a really good price (was more common in the past but still happens now). Just about every business that accepts Bitcoin payments has continual problems with people sending BCH because they thought they had and were sending Bitcoin and BCH copied Bitcoin's address format.
In any other field a knock-off-name like "Bitcoin Cash" would be knocked flat as a trademark infringement, so the public is atypically prepared to protect itself from it.
So you can imagine that many Bitcoiners are not eager to use a purposefully deceptive name that has already created a lot of problems for actual users.
Plus in many people's view Bcash is earnestly a better name, but due to weird symmetry breaking and hateful cult like behaviour means that even though it's a perfectly fine name the BCH pumpers go all RMS-whining-about-GNU/Linux over any use of it which is just amusing.
> He ended up quitting development of Bitcoin
You've seen his side. For an uncharitable take on his contributions:
Mike's sum total contributions to the development of the bitcoin software were a half dozen commits, most of which were trivial string changes. ( https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1337008.0 )
Mike Hearn has a long history advocating for user hostile features in free software, for example he lobbied the Tor project extensively to add censorship. He pushed for adding centralizing features in Bitcoin like blocking all tor peers, phoning home, etc. He was a former employee of QinetiQ, a R&D organization for British intelligence and a system he created at google turned up in the snowden documents as one whos data was being leaked to the british government, shortly after that he parted ways with google. His long term view for Bitcoin security is that it would depend on (government backed) trusted institutions.
Hearn was always largely cultural outsider to Bitcoin-- which many Bitcoin users were wary of, not just on the tech side but in the community in general. There is nothing wrong with reading his perspective, but you should understand some of the context for it.
[I'm aware that this perspective is arguably not the most 'fair'-- e.g. pointing out he worked for British intelligence when I have no reason to think his efforts to centralized Bitcoin were due to anything but his own personal fetish for authority-- but I think it's a good example of how far apart culturally he was from most Bitcoiners. It's also a bit ironic: some of the attacks cited in this thread accuse me/blockstream/bitcoin-devs of being intelligence agents, but they happily ignore the person we know worked in signals intelligence. In any case, unlike the attacks that he and his supporters here lob at me, they're not falsehoods. I'm happy to support them with links.]
> Succinctly, BCH is the continuation of big-blocker's vision of the Bitcoin experiment
I think that's a largely correct statement. But what that experiment shows is telling. BCH's usage is insubstantial compared to Bitcoin (even though the way it was launched forced exchanges almost universally to adopt it). As predicted it is completely unable to secure itself using fees (it typically generates less than $1 per block in fees), making it dependant on continued inflation to pay for security. Not only does the usage not exist, but it has also failed economically in the market: It has lost ~90% of its value in USD terms, and ~95% of its peak value compared Bitcoin. It currently trades at 1.2% of Bitcoin's value after years of almost monotone decline after its first few months.
[It also, sadly, is not a pure realization of the Big Block experiment. Acknowledging the tradeoffs highlighted by the Bitcoin developers, they have continued to limit the blocksize in BCH (though to levels a few times higher than Bitcoin) and introduced many other questionable and controversial changes, spawning multiple additional incompatible forks. Their changes also include an "automatic checkpoints" mechanism that totally breaks the proof of work security model. Weirdly, the "big block vision" is probably most faithfully followed by "BSV", which is a system created and promoted by people that few would disagree are outright scammers, so it too is going nowhere]
I think it's fine and good that people experiment with things (even where I think that the outcome is obvious), the world is only improved by that. But fraudulently claiming the system "is" bitcoin, or spreading malicious, false, and defamatory claims about their competition and critics and engaging in outright harassment in an effort to justify and promote their tokens is really uncool and shouldn't be rewarded.