Bitcoin Cash Price Chart
- Bitcoin Cash
(BCH) - Price $325.33
- Market Cap$6.43 B
What is Bitcoin Cash?
Bitcoin Cash (BCH) is a cryptocurrency created in August 2017 after a hard fork from Bitcoin (BTC). Its main goal is to address Bitcoin’s scalability and transaction speed issues.
A hard fork occurs when a blockchain permanently splits into two versions. Transactions made on one version won’t be recognized on the other. This splitting usually happens when developers and groups of miners disagree on updates to the software that governs a digital token.
Consequently, one group continues to operate under the existing rules while the other creates a new blockchain with an updated software setup, resulting in the generation of a second digital currency.
A Brief History of BCH
Bitcoin Cash was created in 2017 after developers disagreed on the best way to address scalability and transaction speed issues with the Bitcoin blockchain.
The creators of BCH aimed to increase the size of the blocks within the blockchain to store more transactions. They believed this would help reduce transaction fees by accommodating more transactions per block. However, other developers disagreed with this approach, leading the BCH developers to create a fork from the original Bitcoin blockchain.
Bitcoin Cash and Bitcoin are blockchain networks based on Proof-of-Work (PoW) consensus mechanisms. They both have a hard cap of 21 million coins and use nodes to validate transactions.
Bitcoin Cash inherits the core technology of Bitcoin but features a larger block size, allowing it to handle more transactions. BCH can support up to 25,000 transactions per block, significantly higher than Bitcoin’s 1,000 to 1,500 transactions per block.
Notably, Bitcoin Cash also underwent a hard fork in November 2018, splitting into two separate cryptocurrencies, the Bitcoin Satoshi Vision (BSV) and Bitcoin Cash ABC (BCHA), currently called eCash.