Exchange Bitcoin Cash (BCH)

Bitcoin Cash (BCH) is a cryptocurrency born out of the Bitcoin protocol’s 2017 hard fork. Bitcoin Cash is one of the few Bitcoin forks that eventually made their way into the public eye: for example, BCH itself spawned Bitcoin SV — another modification of the original protocol.

To answer the question “What is Bitcoin Cash”, one should take a look at a long and heated debate within the community about possible solutions to the scalability problem, which happened in 2017. One of those solutions was a protocol change called Segregated Witness (SegWit) and the development of the Lightning network, eventually implemented in the Bitcoin network. 

Another group wanted to increase the block size limit to improve transaction times, which, as they felt, was essential for Bitcoin in order to become a feasible payment system instead of being used mostly as a store of value. This was achieved by splitting off what would become Bitcoin Cash, as BCH block size increased first to 8 MB (versus Bitcoin’s 1 MB), and in 2018 again — to 32 MB, which facilitates higher network throughput. This also led to the Bitcoin Cash transaction fees being significantly lower than Bitcoin’s.

Barring the block size, there is virtually no difference between Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash: both are used as a store of value and as a means of p2p payments. Most of the other features are the same, too — for example, Bitcoin Cash also uses Proof-of-Work to secure the network.