Bitcoin Cash (BCH) Price and Analysis

Bitcoin Cash Overview

Bitcoin Cash is a fully decentralized peer to peer electronic cash for the Internet. Like other cryptocurrencies, it relies on a decentralized system whereby no trusted third parties are required in order for it to operate.

Although Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash sound suspiciously similar they are different entities. Bitcoin Cash is a fork of the Bitcoin blockchain ledger and is intended to function as digital cash. This is where things get confusing, although they are not the same thing, if you own Bitcoin, you also own Bitcoin Cash. You will own the same value in Bitcoin Cash as you did in Bitcoin at the point where the block forked. However, if you hold your Bitcoin in an exchange you may not be able to exchange your Bitcoin for Bitcoin Cash, as some exchanges have a policy against this.

The goal of Bitcoin Cash is to increase the number of transactions that the network can process. This has always been somewhat of a limit for Bitcoin, which can’t process as many transactions in a short time period as other, newer cryptocurrencies. Bitcoin Cash wants to be able to processes large amounts of transactions, the amount that would viral huge payment companies like Visa and PayPal.

In November 2018, a group of Bitcoin Cash enthusiasts dubbed the “Professional Stress Test Team” announced that during their test the BCH network saw 733,000 transactions in one day. In terms of capability, Visa is quoted as being capable of 24,000 transactions per second (tps), 7 tps for Bitcoin, and 61 tps for Bitcoin Cash.

Bitcoin Cash was created in mid-2017 in response to Bitcoin’s block size limit that was heavily affecting transaction times. It comes down to scalability – it turns out that Bitcoin just wasn’t scaling well. When Bitcoin was first created, the block size for transactions was one MB. This helped Bitcoin be less vulnerable to DDoS attacks in the early days, but it became seriously impractical as Bitcoin grew more and more popular. By 2017 Bitcoin was highly popular, causing transaction times to be significantly delayed, and some users even reported having to wait up to four days for confirmation of their transaction.

Bitcoin Cash was a solution to this problem; it increased the block size to 8MB, allowing for more transactions and making it faster.

In November 2018 another hard fork update was scheduled for the Bitcoin Cash network; however, developers became split on the issue, unable to come to a compromise. This led to two versions of Bitcoin Cash being spun out, one update by a developer group called Bitcoin ABC, and another implementation dubbed Bitcoin “Satoshi’s Version” (Bitcoin Cash SV), a nod to the original developer of Bitcoin.