In layman’s terms?
Looking at https://coinmarketcap.com/ you can see that each BCH is worth ~$500 (at the time of this comment) and the value of BTC is higher after the split.
so in essence $8,154,513,572 of new value was created from nothing with the split.
If the next split follow the same pattern, more money appears...
How did the cryptocurrency markets handle that, anyway?
What does this mean? BCH can be sold for USD, and there are people willing to buy BCH. Therefore BCH created $8B in new value.
The $8B in value created is entirely nominal, because of the size of the pre-existing supply. In reply the real value created could well be negative or at most in the millions and not billions.
That's not how economics work.
edit: I suppose all these stocks I'm holding are worth $0, since if every person selling them sold tomorrow the value would drop to that price.
The $8B figure for BCH is using the exact same semantics that every other non-cash asset in the entire world uses. But because it's crypto we get pedantry like this.
Bitcoin: "I'm going to create $8B out of thin air"
To take the 100 shares at $500 example from @stanmancan, if one person is willing to pay $500, another 10 is willing to pay $400 for one share each, and one more person is willing to pay $300 for 20 shares, and one large investor is willing to buy up the rest for $100 only, the total demand for the whole company is $14,400 for 100 shares or $144/share. That's the true value.
I can guarantee you that there isn't even an order of magnitude close to $8B of demand for the artificially created and restricted BCH, so that value wasn't really created.
Anyways, I'm not trying to argue that the value of that hypothetical company is $14,400. I'm trying to argue that it's not anywhere near $50k. (Disproving the GP's example that BCH created $8B of value overnight.)
Fed: "Hold my beer..."
No. The market depth of the various Bitcoin Cash markets is tiny. You couldn’t offload even $10M without crashing the price close to zero.
Just because the highest bid is ~$500 doesn’t mean all 16 million Bitcoin Cash coins can be sold for ~$500, thus ~$500*16m hasn’t been created at all — only a tiny fraction of that.
The public exchanges are a gauge of liquidity. A magic private buyer might exist, willing to buy everything you hold, but I see no evidence that one exists for Bitcoin Cash.
Now it probably is all a shell game ultimately, but the longer it persists the more hopeful speculators will use fiat cash to buy into crypto currencies, letting crypto currency holders "cash out"...