Bitcoin Cash is a cryptocurrency and a blockchain-based payment network. It was developed in 2017 as a fork of Bitcoin. In this article, we are going to explain how Bitcoin Cash was developed, what differences it has from Bitcoin, what is its native coin, what is its price history, and what are its wallets. Stay with us.

What is Bitcoin Cash? The creation history

From the time Bitcoin was created, its low speed and high fees have been challenging. Bitcoin can’t process more than 7 transactions per second, and this has affected its daily use. Some people believe that to increase the speed and decrease the fees, there is no need to make fundamental changes to Bitcoin. We can use alternative solutions like Lightning and SegWit for this purpose. Some others believe that these alternative solutions are not effective. According to them, we have to change some of Bitcoin’s limiting rules and overcome this problem fundamentally. Those who developed Bitcoin Cash were followers of the second opinion.

It was in 2015 that Bitcoin’s scalability problems became clear more than ever. Bitcoin was gaining popularity and mass adoption, and it has become too crowded. It wasn’t able to handle that large number of transactions. Bitcoin’s block size is limited to 1MB, and each block can contain 4,000 transactions at most. Since Bitcoin’s blocks are created every 10 minutes, it cannot process more than 7 transactions per second.

Some of Bitcoin’s early supporters proposed increasing Bitcoin’s block size to 8 to 32 megabytes. Rodger Ver and Wu Jihan were two main figures who agreed with this proposal. By the way, they didn’t succeed to persuade all members of the Bitcoin community. Some Bitcoin users disagreed with changing Bitcoin and violating its underlying principles. Therefore, a hard fork occurred and a new blockchain called Bitcoin Cash emerged.

As its name suggests, Bitcoin Cash wishes to be a version of Bitcoin that can be used in daily transactions, exactly like cash money. It was developed on August 1, 2017, as a fork of Bitcoin. This fork happened on block number 478,559. Bitcoin Cash increased the block size to 32MB. Data reveals that Bitcoin Cash is able to process more than 25,000 transactions per block.

It’s interesting to know that Bitcoin Cash was also forked, and this resulted in another blockchain called Bitcoin SV. This fork happened in 2018 as a result of conflicts between Rodger Ver and Craig Wright. SV stands for Satoshi Vision.

How does Bitcoin Cash work? Similarities and differences with Bitcoin

As Bitcoin Cash was created as a fork of Bitcoin, it is obvious that some similarities exist between these two blockchain networks. The first similarity is that Bitcoin Cash uses proof of work and has to be mined. Blocks in Bitcoin Cash are created every 10 minutes, and the reward is also distributed every 10 minutes. At the time of writing, the mining reward for Bitcoin Cash is 6.25 BCH per block. Exactly like Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash goes through the halving process and its mining reward gets halved every 4 years.

One big difference between Bitcoin Cash and Bitcoin is that Bitcoin Cash has removed the “Replace-by-Fee” (RBF) feature. RBF is a feature in Bitcoin that lets an unconfirmed transaction be replaced by another transaction with a higher fee. Therefore, a scammer can make a transaction, show the history to an amateur user before being confirmed, and then make the same transaction to himself/herself with a higher fee. Because the second transaction has a higher fee, it will get confirmed, and the first transaction will be canceled. Bitcoin Cash has removed this code. For this reason, Bitcoin Cash has been titled the “Coffee Coin”. This means that you can use Bitcoin Cash for making everyday transactions like buying a coffee, without having to wait for a long time.

Bitcoin Cash price history

After the ICO in late 2017, Bitcoin Cash has always been among the most popular cryptocurrencies. At the time of writing, Bitcoin Cash has a market cap of $2,192,780,146 and is the thirstiest-largest cryptocurrency by market cap. Each unit of BCH is also being traded at $114.79. Its price peak goes back to December 2017 when it reached more than $3,900.

Exactly like Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash has a supply cap of 21 million units, among which more than 19 million units have been mined.

Bitcoin Cash wallets

Like all other cryptocurrencies, you need digital wallets to store Bitcoin Cash. There are a large number of cryptocurrency wallets that support Bitcoin Cash, some of which include:

• Ledger (hardware)
• Trezor (hardware)
• Atomic (software)
• Coinomi (software)
• Trust Wallet (software)
• SafePal (software)
• Bitcoin.com (software)

Conclusion

The conflicts among Bitcoin’s supporters and fans led to a hard fork and a new blockchain network called Bitcoin Cash. This conflict was over the always-challenging scalability issue and increasing the block size for overcoming this challenge. Bitcoin Cash increased its block size to 32MB. This solution was effective because this blockchain is now able to process more than 25,000 transactions per block. However, this more scalable blockchain never succeeded to surpass Bitcoin in terms of popularity. This may be valid evidence to Bitcoin’s unshakable position as world’s first and biggest cryptocurrency.