Bitcoin Cash (BCH)

Bitcoin Cash (BCH) is an altcoin version of the popular Bitcoin cryptocurrency. Bitcoin Cash is the result of a hard fork in blockchain technology. One of the most significant changes from Bitcoin to Bitcoin Cash is the size of the coin. Previously, Bitcoin’s 1MB limitation caused transaction delays, so Bitcoin Cash increased the potential block size to enable a greater number of transactions and help the cryptocurrency scale as it grew and competed with more traditional cryptocurrency platforms.

After its creation, Bitcoin Cash quickly became the 3rd most successful cryptocurrency, following Bitcoin and Etherium. Although Bitcoin Cash has a higher transaction rate, the currency is not accepted in as many places as Bitcoin or Etherium, and disagreements in the developer community have caused Bitcoin Cash to be promoted as more of an investment tool than a transactional currency.

In November 2018, Bitcoin Cash developers decided that another hard fork was necessary and Bitcoin Cash split in two. Forking is often the result of a deadlock in an open source project that is so insurmountable that all work stops. Typically this happens when development team members are unable to resolve personal conflicts or fail to reach a consensus about next steps.

In this particular fork, one group of developers felt that block size should be limited to 32MB. The second group put forth a competing software version that increased blocksize to 128MB. As of this writing, the two Bitcoin Cash forks are commonly referred to as Bitcoin ABC (Bitcoin Adjustable Blocksize Cap) and Bitcoin SV (Satoshi’s Vision).

Bitcoin Cash trades on digital currency exchanges including Bitstamp, Coinbase, Gemini, Kraken and ShapeShift, using the Bitcoin Cash name and the BCH ticker symbol.