What is Bitcoin Cash, and how does BCH work? A beginner's guide
-
Loading... - Vicente Gonzalez
- 19 Jan 2023
- 74 Views
- 0 Like
- 0 Comment
Bitcoin Cash (BCH) is a proof-of-work blockchain network and cryptocurrency that’s faster and cheaper to use than Bitcoin (BTC). The asset was created via a hard fork of the Bitcoin blockchain network and has since developed its own community. Like its predecessor, Bitcoin Cash is accepted at certain merchants, can be bought on PayPal and represents another way to transact value.
BCH was meant to solve many of Bitcoin’s long-standing issues — but such a solution caused a rift in the crypto community. While the two can easily coexist, many argue over which will be the asset of the future.
The history of Bitcoin Cash
The first Bitcoin block, the genesis block, was officially mined on Jan. 3, 2009. Since then, the asset has exploded in popular culture. However, Bitcoin — the world’s first cryptocurrency — still suffers from scalability issues and long transaction times. This is where Bitcoin Cash comes into play.
The idea of Bitcoin Cash came to be in 2017 as a solution to Bitcoin’s transaction speed issues. It’s a hard fork of the Bitcoin blockchain, meaning the network “split” in two at a certain block — in this case, block 478,558. That block holds a fundamental protocol change that invalidates all previous blocks, requiring nodes to “upgrade” to the new chain to continue using it.
It’s essentially an enormous software update through which the previous network goes on in a direction separate from the new one. In this case, that previous network is Bitcoin, while the Bitcoin Cash fork forged its own future.
The fork was decided on by various miners and developers within the Bitcoin network who were hoping to get rid of its limitations. After all, many assume Bitcoin is meant to be used for digital transactions as opposed to as a store of value. How can Bitcoin appeal to the mainstream if said transactions take minutes or even hours at a time? And that’s not to mention high transaction fees. Read More…
