What Is Bitcoin Cash?
Bitcoin Cash (BCH) is a cryptocurrency that was created and launched to bring decentralization back to cryptocurrency. It is the result of a 2017 Bitcoin “hard fork,” which occurs when an existing blockchain splits into two. Bitcoin Cash allows a greater number of transactions in a single block than Bitcoin and reduce fees and transaction times.
Bitcoin Cash is designed to be used as a cheap payment system, much in the way Bitcoin was designed to be originally. Transaction fees are generally lower, and confirmation times are significantly less than Bitcoin’s, generally within seconds.
Learn more about Bitcoin Cash and how it differs from Bitcoin.
Bitcoin Cash is the result of a Bitcoin hard fork that happened in August 2017.
Bitcoin Cash was created to allow more transactions in a single block, theoretically decreasing the fees and transaction times.
Despite their philosophical differences, Bitcoin Cash and Bitcoin share several technical similarities:
They use the same consensus mechanism and have capped their supply at 21 million coins.
Bitcoin Cash continues to trade—at a fraction of Bitcoin’s price—but has yet to achieve widespread consumer acceptance as a form of payment.
Bitcoin’s blockchain had scalability issues because it could not handle the increased number of transactions. The confirmation time and fees for a transaction on Bitcoin’s blockchain surged. This was mainly due to the 1MB block size limitation for Bitcoin blocks. Transactions queued up, waiting for confirmation, because blocks could not handle the increased number of transactions the network was experiencing.
Bitcoin Cash was created in 2017 when developers disagreed on the route Bitcoin should take to address emerging issues with the blockchain. Transaction fees continued to rise between 2009 and 2016. By June 2017, fees hit more than $5 before fluctuating and skyrocketing to over $54 in December.
Bitcoin Cash was created and is maintained by an active community of developers. These developers saw Bitcoin Cash as a necessary alternative to Bitcoin because, in their view, Bitcoin had become more of an investment instrument than a payment system. It was designed as a peer-to-peer payment system that removes regulatory authorities and other third parties from financial transactions, but it had become something else.