| title | description | published | date | tags | editor | dateCreated |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Bitcoin Cash |
Bitcoin cash is a blockchain and cryptocurrency that forked from Bitcoin. |
true |
2021-05-16 00:30:25 UTC |
bitcoin-cash |
markdown |
2021-03-16 00:00:39 UTC |
Bitcoin Cash is a blockchain and cryptocurrency that separated from Bitcoin with the idea of solving the heavily debated scaling issue and having a cryptocurrency that could be used in daily transactions. To accomplish this, they increased the size of each block, making transaction fees cheaper and allowing more transactions at a faster rate.
Bitcoin Cash blocks are visualized on TxStreet as green buses with the Bitcoin Cash logo, the block number, and the transaction fee associated.
- Houses
- Live Stats {.links-list}
Bitcoin Cash (BCH) is a blockchain and cryptocurrency that emerged from the first successful hard fork of Bitcoin with the goal of pursuing what Satoshi laid out; A cryptocurrency that could be used daily. The two blockchains have mostly similar qualities, they both use the same Proof-of-Work consensus algorithm (so coins are put into circulation via mining), both coin supplies are capped at 21 million, they both measure transaction fees in satoshis-per-bytes, and everything on each blockchain from before the fork is identical.
Where Bitcoin Cash differs is that it has a larger block size and has not integrated segwit or any of the updates Bitcoin has pushed since the fork. The benefit of larger blocks is that the network is able to process transactions faster and with less expensive transaction fees. The issue with larger blocks is that they require more computing power, so if they eventually become too large then only a select few people will be capable of mining blocks, resulting in a more centralized blockchain.
Since the inception of Bitcoin, there was a known fear that when the network reached a large number of users, transactions would be slowed and rather expensive. Over the years preceding Bitcoin Cash, many projects attempted to fork from Bitcoin in the hopes of creating a more successful transactional cryptocurrency using larger block sizes, but most of them are largely considered failures as of today. An early favorite among the community, Bitcoin XT, was introduced in 2014 with increased block sizes of 8 MB that would double every two years if certain conditions were met. Over time the project died off, although it inspired Bitcoin Classic which released in 2016 and increased Bitcoin's block size to 2 MB rather than 8 MB. Bitcoin classic suffered the same slow demise as Bitcoin XT and would later announce their support for Bitcoin Cash. Bitcoin Unlimited was also released in 2016 and it allowed miners to choose their block size along with a block limit they would be willing to process. The idea was that miners using Bitcoin Unlimited would mine regular 1 MB blocks on the Bitcoin blockchain until there were enough larger blocks and enough people willing to verify those larger blocks. If that were to happen, those larger blocks would be mined on a new blockchain with no limit so that miners could adjust the block size accordingly.
Throughout 2017, the community was frantically looking for a scaling solution, meaning they wanted to find a way to increase the amount of transactions per second to accommodate the rapidly increasing amount of users on the Bitcoin network. On May 23, 2017, the Bitcoin Scaling Agreement, or New York Agreement (NYA), was proposed to solve the long debated scaling issue of Bitcoin. The proposal included activating segwit and a 2 MB block size increase hard fork known as SegWit2x sometime in the following six months. At first, the proposal was widely accepted by miners and the companies involved with the NYA, but many in the community had doubts about SegWit2x. Segwit was successfully deployed to the Bitcoin blockchain, but SegWit2x continued struggling to gain consensus across the community, eventually leading to the suspension of the hard fork. Despite this, a small group attempted to continue with the update, but it was launched one block too early, causing SegWit2x to be locked in a permanent standstill.
When it became apparent that block sizes wouldn't be increased, a select group of those that were in favor of moving forward with a block size increase came together in June of 2017 to unveil the software that was creating and testing Bitcoin Cash's blockchain. On August 1, 2017, users that disagreed with segwit being added and still wanted to implement larger block sizes rejected Bitcoin transactions and blocks to make their split onto the Bitcoin Cash blockchain. Those holding any amount of bitcoin at the time received Bitcoin Cash at a 1:1 ratio, so those holding 5 BTC were given 5 BCH.