Exactly a year ago a feud in the community gave birth to the biggest hard-fork of Bitcoin (BTC) – Bitcoin Cash (BCH).
How Did it Come to That?
Bitcoin’s original code limited the size of the block to 1MB, which lowered the possibility of SPAM and DDoS attacks. Until 2017 that functioned flawlessly as the capacity was big enough to support the small amount of traffic on the blockchain.
But with the wider adoption, some problems appeared that haven’t been foreseen.
The Bitcoin transactions became much slower and more expensive to the point that The King became totally inefficient, due to the overcrowdedness of the network. Paying $5 for a sandwich took as long as four hours, and demanded a $15 miner’s fee, which was clearly unacceptable.
The opposing sides disagreed on how to make Bitcoin more efficient.
The proposed SegWit2x (Segregated Witness) solution meant that some of the traffic would be conducted off the mother-chain, which didn’t find a consensus, as the other part of the Bitcoin community thought that raising the block size would solve the problem more elegantly.
The disagreement turned into a full-scale war, which resulted in the opposing sides parting ways through the already infamous Bitcoin Cash (BCH) hard-fork when all the owners of Bitcoin were granted the same amount of the new cryptocurrency.
Bitcoin Cash is Following the Satoshi’s Vision?
Ever since the birth of the Bitcoin Cash, the former Bitcoin evangelist, Roger Ver claims that they were forced to fork Bitcoin to continue following the vision of the maker of the first and still the biggest cryptocurrency, the yet unidentified, Satoshi Nakamoto.
Their claims are backed by the fact that the original Bitcoin whitepaper has a line which says that “Bitcoin is a peer-to-peer electronic cash system.”
Such an expensive and slow network, which Bitcoin has become, can hardly be used as a means of payment, therefore, as the BCH supporters claim, can’t be considered as electronic cash.
There are Differences and Similarities
Bitcoin Cash is rather similar to its father because it is a derivative of its original code with a few crucial differences.
The block size of the Bitcoin Cash blockchain is 8 MB, and its system doesn’t include SegWit technology as well as the “replace by fee” feature. It has replay and wipeout protection and offers a much quicker adjustment of the proof-of-work difficulty than the one found in Bitcoin.
The effect of these differences is best portrayed by the fact that Bitcoin Cash had up to 99,56% cheaper transactions than Bitcoin.
A Rocky Road is Behind (and in Front of) Bitcoin Cash
Since the first day of existence until the beginning of 2018, BCH had a steady growth as it was quickly adopted by the cryptocurrency enthusiasts, surging from the starting $555 to the astronomical $4,090 in a little more than four months.
With the coming of crypto-market bears of 2018, Bitcoin Cash’s price started to drop rapidly along with all other cryptocurrencies, including Bitcoin.
After the sign of hope carried by the spring sun in the month of May, when BCH vas briefly valued $1,700, the coin which currently sits at the fourth spot on coinmarketcap.com, sank deeper.
Today, one Bitcoin Cash is worth $766, which can be viewed either as a catastrophic result by the unbelievers, or the perfect investment opportunity by the believers.
However it may be, there is a long way in front of Bitcoin Cash to reach its former heights.
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