Bitcoin Cash

Bitcoin Cash is a cryptocurrency that was created in August 2017, from a fork of Bitcoin. This means that anyone who held Bitcoin at that time has the same amount of Bitcoin Cash, and any decisions about Bitcoin’s future are separated from Bitcoin Cash’s future.

The reason for the fork was a disagreement in the Bitcoin community about how to scale the Bitcoin network. Transactions were becoming slower and more expensive as the network grew, and different solutions were proposed to solve this.

Bitcoin Cash was a solution proposed by a faction of the community that wanted to increase the block size in the Bitcoin blockchain. A “block” in the blockchain is a record of some or all of the most recent Bitcoin transactions that have not yet entered any prior blocks. In Bitcoin, the size of a block is limited to 1MB, which was causing congestion on the network as Bitcoin’s popularity increased.

Bitcoin Cash increased this limit to 8MB (and later to 32MB) to allow more transactions to be processed in each block, theoretically making transactions faster and less expensive. This is a more “on-chain” solution, keeping all transactions in the Bitcoin Cash blockchain.

However, increasing block size has its own set of challenges. Larger blocks can make it more difficult for some users to participate in the network, leading to more centralization. It can also increase the requirements for storage, computational power, and bandwidth for nodes that are maintaining the blockchain.

Since its creation, Bitcoin Cash has remained a separate cryptocurrency from Bitcoin, with its own market price, development team, and user base. It’s one of many examples of how the open-source nature of Bitcoin allows different groups to propose their own solutions to problems and create new cryptocurrencies based on those solutions.