Bitcoin Cash is a hard fork of the cryptocurrency bitcoin. The fork occured on August 1, 2017. If you owned any bitcoin (BTC) at this moment, you own the same amount of BCH!
Bitcoin Cash is meant to be used as peer-to-peer digital cash for the world. It is fast, reliable and secured ; with almost no payment fees.
It is a cryptocurrency forked from the main Bitcoin (BTC) block almost at the same time, but with an adjustable block size up to 8 MB.
The future shines brightly with unrestricted growth, global adoption, permissionless innovation and decentralized development.
Bitcoin Cash brings sound money to the world; fulfilling the original promise of Bitcoin as “Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash”. Merchants and users are empowered with low fees and reliable confirmations. The future shines brightly with unrestricted growth, global adoption, permissionless innovation, and decentralized development.
Bitcoin Cash (BCH) is a hard forked version of the original Bitcoin. It is similar to bitcoin with regards to its protocol; Proof of Work SHA-256 hashing, 21,000,000 supply, same block times and reward system. However two main differences are the the blocksize limits, as of August 2017 Bitcoin has a 1MB blocksize limit whereas BCH proposes 8MB blocks. Also BCH will adjust the difficulty every 6 blocks as oppose to 2016 blocks as done by bitcoin.
A hard fork is a radical change to the protocol that makes previously invalid blocks/transactions valid (or vice-versa). This requires all nodes or users to upgrade to the latest version of the protocol software. Put differently, a hard fork is a permanent divergence from the previous version of the blockchain, and nodes running previous versions will no longer be accepted by the newest version. This essentially creates a fork in the blockchain: one path follows the new, upgraded blockchain, and the other path continues along the old path.
The new rules enforced by the bitcoin cash software represent a break with the legacy rules of bitcoin and were not compatible with it; to ensure smooth operation, exchanges and wallets needed to upgrade their software which required them to develop (and plan for) this contingency and migrate to supporting software that can handle both types of bitcoin.
Bitcoin Cash is mining friendly. Anyone with an Internet connection and the appropriate hardware can contribute to the network. All you need is a computer, some free time, and the ability to add your computer to the Bitcoin Cash network.
Bitcoin Cash miners can also decide when to print money, they hold all of the power. However they cannot decide when or if you will be able to transfer that value for a transaction at their discretion. It is up to them whether or not they include your transaction in a block, the transaction fee will determine whether or not it is likely to be included.
Bitcoin has 1MB blocksize limit that cannot be raised without a hard fork. It was made clear that the 1MB blocksize limit could not be lifted entirely by Core developers.
At the same time, more and more transactions are happening on the Bitcoin network every day. It is essential that these transactions get into a block. If they don't, transaction fees rise and users pay more for their transactions to get confirmed, which makes Bitcoin less attractive.
