Overview: Bitcoin Cash or BCH is a cryptocurrency that emerged out from the hard-fork of Bitcoin back in August 2017. The fork was inevitable, as many community members wanted a better version of bitcoin.
A protocol with larger block size, something that is faster than Bitcoin, as you see, the problem with Bitcoin, is used by a lot of people; hence it takes a lot of time to process the transaction. To give you an overview, it can manage only seven transactions per minute. By this, it imposed more transaction fees as well.
What is Bitcoin Cash? (BCH)
Bitcoin Cash is a cryptocurrency. It came into existence on 1st August 2017, as a result of Bitcoin hard-fork. It happened as many of the community members decided to upgrade the bitcoin network and had a debate over the scalability issues of the bitcoin.
They proposed a larger block size that can solve almost all the current problems, and hence they decided to part ways via a hard-fork on bitcoin and created the revolutionary Bitcoin Cash. Like any other crypto, BCH as well comes with its own Blockchain, and new BCH can be created by bitcoin cash mining.
Whenever you need to update a Blockchain, there are two ways to do that. First, one being a Soft-Fork and the other is the Hard-Fork. With Soft-Fork, you can consider it as an update to your firmware, like upgrading from Android 9 to Android 10.
However, with Hard-Fork, it is about improving the complete device itself. Like from Playstation 3 to 4. It’s not backwards compatible, meaning you switch to a new system if you want to enjoy the upgrades.
Working and Specs of BCH
Bitcoin Cash has the following specs,
- A minimum of 8MB Blocksize or is in a range of (8-32MB)
- It does not use the Segregated-witness (SegWit) to increase transactions.
- Transaction signatures are validated on the Blockchain itself, unlike bitcoin who excludes transaction signature from the transaction ID.
- As stated earlier, it relies upon increasing block size for scalability.
But that’s not it. Developers keep perfecting it, and you can track all the significant changes from here.
Block size is directly proportional to the number of Transactions
With blocksize ranging in between 8MB to 32MB, an average number of transactions per block can range from 1200 to 1500. A stress test was conducted on 1st September 2017, which led to 25000 transactions per block. During the trial, a total of 2.1 Million low fees transactions were carried out within 24 hours. It was to check the capability and scalability of BCH.
Fewer transaction fees
So with Bitcoin, you pay a fee of about 1$ per transaction; some days, it went even as high as 25$. When it comes to BCH, you pay an average cost of about 0.2$ per transaction. It will save you a lot of money if you choose to make transactions via the BCH network.
Trade effectively
Bitcoin trading is not a new process to learn. It works the same as the traditional trading works. If you are searching how to trade effectively in Bitcoin read our detailed guides updated regulalry.
Faster Transactions
If you do a transaction over bitcoin, it can take up to 10 minutes before you can verify the transaction. With BCH, it takes seconds for a transaction to settle. Also, you get more transactions to do per second; in general, it also increases reliability and maintains the trust factor regarding the completion of the transactions that you perform.
Conclusion
But, it’s not all about advantages, BCH will probably take a lot of time to penetrate the existing market. Even with mining, it takes almost similar effort to mine bitcoin; hence you stay at a loss of 50-60% if you mine BCH. As a result, with miners, they won’t adapt to BCH anytime soon.
A BCH block is about 8 to 32 times bigger than that of Bitcoin. This helps Bitcoin Cash to do more transactions, take fewer fees, and perform faster, reliable, and secure transactions as compared to BTC.
Do not get confused by Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash as both are entirely different networks. Adoption of Bitcoin Cash among investors is so phenomenal that it quickly made to the top 5 cryptocurrencies ever in no time since its inception.
It is a system that is getting constant upgrades, and soon enough, it can be your favourite crypto. You can track the roadmap of the planned and upcoming updates on their official website from here.