WHAT IS BITCOIN CASH?
Bitcoin Cash (BCH) is a hard fork of the cryptocurrency Bitcoin. The fork occurred on August 1, 2017. Bitcoin Cash increased block size limit from one megabyte to eight megabytes.
BITCOIN CASH (BCH)
Coinbase has just added full support for Bitcoin Cash (BCH) – meaning you can now send, receive, buy and sell the cryptocurrency. All users will also be credited an amount of Bitcoin Cash equal to their Bitcoin balance during the hard fork that occurred August 1st, 2017.
Bitcoin Cash trading will also be available on GDAX, Coinbase’s institutional-focused exchange.
Idea forms
On July 20, 2017 Bitcoin Improvement Proposal (BIP) 91, aka Segregated Witness, activated.
Some members of the Bitcoin community felt that adopting BIP 91 without increasing the block-size limit would simply delay confronting the Bitcoin scalability problem and that it favored people who wanted to treat Bitcoin as a digital investment rather than as a transactional currency.
The plan to do a hardfork was first announced by Bitmain. The project was originally referred to as UAHF: A contingency plan against UASF (BIP148) by Bitmain on their corporate blog, which the ASIC bitcoin mining hardware manufacturer would launch if BIP 148 (a User Activated Soft Fork) succeeded. Subsequently, developers took interest in the project. The Bitcoin Cash name was originally proposed by Chinese mining pool ViaBTC.
Development
The first implementation of the Bitcoin Cash protocol called Bitcoin ABC was revealed by Amaury “Deadal Nix” Séchet at the Future of Bitcoin conference in Arnhem, Netherlands. The Bitcoin Cash hard fork was announced to take place on August 1, 2017.
Launch
Upon launch, Bitcoin Cash inherited the transaction history of the Bitcoin currency on that date, but all later transactions were separate. Block 478558 was the last common block and thus the first Bitcoin Cash block was 478559. Bitcoin Cash cryptocurrency wallet started to reject BTC block and BTC transactions since 13:20 UTC, August 1, 2017 because it used a timer to initiate a fork. It implements a block size increase to 8 MB. One exchange started Bitcoin Cash futures trading at 0.5 BTC on July 23; the futures dropped to 0.1 BTC by July 30. Market cap appeared since 23:15 UTC, August 1, 2017.
Move of hashpower and change to difficulty
On August 9, it was 30% more profitable to mine on the original chain. Due to the new Emergency Difficulty Adjustment (EDA) algorithm used by Bitcoin Cash, mining difficulty has fluctuated rapidly, and the most profitable chain to mine has thus switched repeatedly between Bitcoin Cash and mainline Bitcoin. As both chains use the same proof-of-work algorithm, miners can easily move their hashpower between the two. As of August 30, 2017 around 1,500 more blocks were mined on the Bitcoin Cash chain than on the original one as the high profitability periods attracted a significant proportion of total processing power.
A fix for these difficulty/hashrate/profitability fluctuations was introduced on November 13, 2:06PM UTC. The EDA algorithm has been replaced with a new difficulty adjustment algorithm (DAA) that hopes to prevent extreme fluctuations in difficulty while still allowing Bitcoin Cash to adapt to hashrate changes faster than mainline Bitcoin.
Market acceptance and naming
Cryptocurrency exchanges
Eventually Bitcoin Cash was broadly adopted by digital currency exchanges. Exchanges such as Bitfinex, Bitstamp, CEX.IO, Kraken, ShapeShift and many others use the Bitcoin Cash name and the BCH ticker symbol for the cryptocurrency. Temporarily, Bitstamp and Bitfinex used the name Bcash, but after being criticized, they switched the name back to Bitcoin Cash.
Huobi exchange uses the name Bitcoin Cash and the BCC ticker symbol.
Cryptocurrency wallets
While the alphanumeric address style is the same as mainline Bitcoin (BTC), that Bitcoin Cash (BCH/BCC) should not be sent to a Bitcoin (BTC) address. Like mainline Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash addresses can be used more than once, but should not be reused if privacy is a concern. However there are plans to change the address format.
Cryptocurrency wallets such as the Ledger hardware wallet, KeepKey hardware wallet, Electron Cash software wallet, Bitcoin.com software wallet and many others use the name Bitcoin Cash for the cryptocurrency, using either BCH or BCC ticker symbol for it.
Trezor hardware wallet uses both Bitcoin Cash and Bcash cryptocurrency names. Its architect Marek “Slush” Palatinus explained: “The reason we prefer to use ‘Bcash’ is to protect users from using the wrong wallet by accident.”
Supporters
Notable supporters of Bitcoin Cash (both the idea of increasing the block size and the split of the cryptocurrency) include investor Roger Ver.