A Brief History of Bitcoin Cash
Cryptocurrencies have been parading down the red carpet for some time now, lapping up the limelight. The well-known volatility of the crypto market has added to the excitement and hype. But where did it all start? This Medium series from Contentworks takes a look at the history of some of crypto’s top players and how each digital asset shot to stardom. Let’s delve into the evolution of Bitcoin Cash.
What is Bitcoin Cash?
As you know, Bitcoin is a decentralised peer-to-peer electronic cash system. It doesn’t rely on a central authority and was originally described in a whitepaper by the anonymous Satoshi Nakamoto released in 2008. With a fixed supply of 21 million Bitcoins and the ability to make fast, reliable and secure transactions, Bitcoin quickly piqued interest, however it hasn’t all been smooth sailing.
As Bitcoin became a worldwide phenomenon, bumps in the road started to occur regarding scalability. As the 1MB blocks within the blockchain started to become full, less reliable transactions and higher fees started to cause friction. While one group of the Bitcoin community wanted to keep the 1MB block sizes and work on off-chain settlement layers, another group wanted to increase the block size resulting in more transactions per block. This resulted in a hard fork of the Bitcoin blockchain to increase the block size. The new chain had 8MB blocks and was called Bitcoin Cash. The other prong of the fork became Bitcoin Core. This deviates from the original Bitcoin concept due to slow transactions.
The Benefits of Bitcoin Cash
When a hard fork occurs, the survival and success of a cryptocurrency is always put into question. But the evolvement of Bitcoin Cash proved to be a good move. Indeed, it’s often dubbed as one of the earliest and most-successful hard forks of the original Bitcoin. And for this reason, holds and important place in the history of altcoins. BCH started the year at $168.8, enjoyed a sharp rise through April to $300.8 and reached $477.7 on June 22nd, 2019. As of August 2019, the current price is $334.5.
So, what are the benefits of Bitcoin Cash? Well, the hard fork and emergence of Bitcoin Cash made Bitcoin usable as cash for the world again. The most important thing for the Bitcoin Cash community is it kept the original Bitcoin vision maintaining fast transaction speeds and low fees. It has also remained decentralised meaning it’s not affected by political and social developments.
The Future of Bitcoin Cash
Bitcoin Cash advancements to date have included upgraded block sizes to 32MB as well as the removal of the Segregated Witness protocol which impacted block space. The future looks promising thanks to unrestricted growth, global adoption, permission-less innovation and decentralised development. As of block 478558, all Bitcoin holders are also owners of Bitcoin Cash. This enables the Bitcoin community to grow alongside the mission of creating sound money accessible to the whole world.
In order to build and maintain the infrastructure, Bitcoin Cash unleashed a development fund where those interested in getting Bitcoin Cash ready for global adoption could contribute. As of August, over half of the 1600 BCH goal has been reached.
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