The Birth of “Bitcoin Cash”

Bitcoin Cash was born through the ‘Hard Fork’ of Bitcoin. A hard fork is a transmutation to the open-source software of Bitcoin’s blockchain. This results in two branches of the blockchain in which one branch follows the old set of protocols, while the other follows a new set of protocols.  

Before getting to the descriptive differences between BTC and BCH, let’s quickly have an overview of the hard fork of Bitcoin Cash.  

On May 23, 2017, a large number of Bitcoin businesspeople and miners, that constituted about 85% of the total Bitcoin holding entities, held a closed-door meeting to decide what the future of Bitcoin would look like. The result of the meeting was the SegWit2x upgrade.  

SegWit2x or Segregated Witness was the proposed upgrade that would potentially scale Bitcoin by segregating the data outside the block’s finite space and adjusting the size of the blocks to 2MB. This was meant to be implemented through a hard fork. The proposal faced resistance from the community because the centralizing force i.e. Bitcoin’s main codebase was not taken into consideration.  

In this debate, those who were in the favor of small blocks were against the increase in the block size, as it would lead to difficulty for full node hosting, which could centralize the currency. On the flip side, the people supporting larger block sizes debated for an agile solution raising the flag of Bitcoin’s surging transaction fees, which might put the currency’s growth in a pitfall. This debate gave rise to the Hard Fork as the individuals supporting bigger blocks decided to fork the blockchain of Bitcoin on August 1, 2017. As a result, Bitcoin Cash came into existence.  

Bitcoin is the first cryptocurrency and is recognized as Digital Gold. It also has a high trading volume due to more trading pairs and higher liquidity. Simply saying that Bitcoin is popular would be a big understatement. Bitcoin is a term that is known by almost everyone, from a small kid to an elderly person. It has indeed become a household name. If you ask anyone to name one crypto-currency that comes first in their mind, it would be Bitcoin. It is the first-ever cryptocurrency to come into existence and is by far the most valuable. Bitcoin (or BTC) is also preferred as a digital currency and as an inflation hedge.

In contrast, Bitcoin Cash (or BCH) is a cryptocurrency that was developed as an electronic payments mechanism that was cheap and simple to operate. Bitcoin Cash is spreading its roots in the crypto space and has faster transaction times as it has a larger block size and can handle more transactions at a time. Each blockchain can create only 21 million coins and the number of issued coins is halved every 210000 blocks. It is forecasted that 2140 would be the year in which the last BTC and BCH would be mined.  

In this blog, we discuss the differences between Bitcoin Cash and Bitcoin. So let’s get started.