Know Your Crypto : Bitcoin Cash (BCH)

• Bitcoin Cash enables peer-to-peer payments between individuals
• It was created to solve the future of cryptocurrency and its scalability.

Founded by Roger Ver, developers and miners, Bitcoin Cash is a hard fork of Bitcoin which offers peer to peer payments (p2p) between individuals. Bitcoin is limited by processing and transaction time which was the issue that caused the breakout between top developers and key stakeholders such as miners. The developers created BCH due to great concerns about the future of cryptocurrency and its scalability.

Currently, Bitcoin cash holds a market cap of $2 billion placing it as the 30th largest cryptocurrency by marketcap, while BCH exchanges hands for  $115.9 after reaching an all time high of $4,355.62. There are a total of 19,181,569 BCH in circulation and the maximum supply is 21,000,000 BCH.

Bitcoin blocks are limited to 1MB while Bitcoin cash blocks can be up to 32MB. The larger block size helps in improving Bitcoin’s scalability. The result of a hard fork is that the blockchain splits into two. Hard forks can also split a cryptocurrency network in two if they are not entirely adopted. Also, if enough miners, nodes, validators, or other entities within a network adopt a proposed hard fork, they may force a blockchain division.

Bitcoin cash is able to process transactions more quickly than Bitcoin network. The transaction time and fees tend to be lower. However, there are downsides that comes with fast transactions. One issue with the larger block size associated with BCH is that security could be compromised as compared to the Bitcoin network.

In September 2017 ,cryptocurrency exchange BitMEX presented results that SegWit implementation had helped increase the block size to a steady adoption rate for the technology. Proposals to both implement SegWit and double the block size were known as SegWit2x.

To mine Bitcoin one requires a mining rig, a wallet and capable infrastructure to host ones mining operations. Bitcoin Cash enables peer-to-peer payments between individuals, like cash, but in digital form. Fees for sending Bitcoin Cash are typically a fraction of a cent, while settlement occurs almost instantly regardless of the physical location of the participants in the transaction. These features make Bitcoin Cash useful for daily transactions as well as microtransactions.