The following will discuss the main features of Bitcoin Cash, one of the most popular hard forks in history
Summary
How and why Bitcoin Cash was born
Born as a fork of Bitcoin in August 2017 to overcome some problems with slow transactions on the network, Bitcoin Cash now exists in its own light, although it still retains the structure of its progenitor, with a substantial difference in the size of the chain’s blocks, making it more scalable than the original.
The cryptocurrency underwent another fork in November 2018 and split into Bitcoin Cash ABC and Bitcoin Cash SV (Satoshi Vision). In November 2020, Bitcoin Cash ABC underwent another fork, which some thought would cause ABC to disappear, but it did not.
BCH has its own blockchain and its own particularities compared to Bitcoin. Compared to the parent blockchain, it has an increased block size of 8 MB to speed up the verification process of transactions.
As of March 2022, the maximum block size for BCH has been quadrupled to 32 MB.
The developers who created the fork in 2017 had the clear aim of increasing the network’s TPS, which were considered excessively slow, and were thus increased to 116 compared to the Bitcoin network’s 7.
This feature allows the digital currency to be more scalable and increase adoption for real-life payments. However, it is still a long way from the TPS that traditional payment circuits are able to process. Visa, for example, currently handles about 65,000 TPS.
The cryptocurrency website states that:
“Bitcoin Cash is digital money for the whole world that delivers on its original promise of being ‘Peer-to-Peer Electronic Money’. Thanks to decentralized development, its future is bright, limitless and aimed at global adoption”.
The pros and cons of Bitcoin Cash
While Bitcoin Cash is able to process transactions faster than the Bitcoin network due to its increased block size, there are downsides.
According to some experts, the larger block size associated with BCH could lead to some security problems compared to the Bitcoin network.
Bitcoin Cash currently has a capitalization of around $3.7 billion and is in 24th place in the ranking of the most capitalized cryptocurrencies, far behind Bitcoin’s capitalization of around $570 billion.
In January 2021, Roger Ver, an early investor in Bitcoin nicknamed “Bitcoin Jesus”, predicted a sky-high price of $100,000 for BCH within the next decade. According to Ver, the fact that fees are cheaper and transactions faster would make the cryptocurrency one of the best tools for payments.
Who knows if Ver will have seen right once again. For the time being, BCH, at its current price of around $195, has recorded losses of more than 40% in the last month, 64% in the last six months, 54% since the beginning of the year, and as much as 68% since last year.
