Bitcoin Cash is a cryptocurrency. In mid-2017, a group of developers wanting to increase bitcoin block size limit prepared a code change. The change, called a hard fork, took effect on 1 August 2017. As a result, the bitcoin ledger called the blockchain and the cryptocurrency split in two. At the time of the fork anyone owning bitcoin was also in possession of the same number of Bitcoin Cash units.
Video Bitcoin Cash
Classification
Bitcoin Cash is a cryptocurrency and a payment network. In relation to bitcoin it is characterized variously as a spin-off, a strand, a product of a hard fork, an offshoot, a clone, a second version or an altcoin.
Maps Bitcoin Cash
History
Rising fees on the bitcoin network contributed to a push by some in the community to create a hard fork to increase the blocksize. This push came to a head in July 2017 some members of the Bitcoin community including Roger Ver felt that adopting BIP 91 without increasing the block-size limit favored people who wanted to treat Bitcoin as a digital investment rather than as a transactional currency. This push by some to increase the block size met a resistance. Since its inception, Bitcoin users had maintained a common set of rules for the cryptocurrency. Eventually, a group of bitcoin activists, investors, entrepreneurs, developers and largely China based miners were unhappy with bitcoin's proposed SegWit improvement plans meant to increase capacity and pushed forward alternative plans for a split which created Bitcoin Cash. The proposed split included a plan to increase the number of transactions its ledger can process by increasing the block size limit to eight megabytes.
The would be hard fork with an expanded block size limit was described by hardware manufacturer Bitmain in June 2017 as a "contingency plan" should the Bitcoin community decide to fork; the first implementation of the software was proposed under the name Bitcoin ABC at a conference that month. In July 2017, the Bitcoin Cash name was proposed by mining pool ViaBTC. Bitcoin Cash is also referred to as Bcash.
Trading
Bitcoin Cash trades on digital currency exchanges including Bitstamp, Coinbase, Gemini, Kraken, and ShapeShift using the Bitcoin Cash name and the BCH ticker symbol for the cryptocurrency. A few other exchanges use the BCC ticker symbol, though BCC is commonly used for Bitconnect. On 26 March 2018, OKEX removed all Bitcoin Cash trading pairs except for BCH/BTC, BCH/ETH and BCH/USDT due to "inadequate liquidity". As of May 2018, daily transaction numbers for Bitcoin Cash are about one-tenth of those of bitcoin.
By November 2017 the value of Bitcoin Cash, which had been as high as $900, had fallen to around $300, much of that due to people who had originally held Bitcoin selling off the Bitcoin Cash they received at the hard fork.
See also
- Bitcoin scalability problem
- List of Bitcoin forks
- List of cryptocurrencies
References
External links
- Official website
Source of article : Wikipedia