Bitcoin Cash (BCH)

Overview

Bitcoin Cash is a hard fork of Bitcoin with a protocol upgrade to fix on-chain capacity. Bitcoin Cash intends to be a Bitcoin without Segregated Witness (SegWit) as soft fork, where upgrades of the protocol are done mainly through hard forks and without changing the original economic rules of the Bitcoin. Bitcoin Cash (BCH) is released on 1st August 2017 as an upgraded version of the original Bitcoin Core software. The main upgrade is the increase in the block size limit from 1MB to 8MB. This effectively allows miners on the BCH chain to process up to 8 times more payments per second in comparison to Bitcoin. This makes for faster, cheaper transactions and a much smoother user experience. Why was Bitcoin Cash Created? The main objective of Bitcoin Cash is to to bring back the essential qualities of money inherent in the original Bitcoin software. Over the years, these qualities were filtered out of Bitcoin Core and progress was stifled by various people, organizations, and companies involved in Bitcoin protocol development. The result is that Bitcoin Core is currently unusable as money due to increasingly high fees per transactions and transfer times taking hours to complete. This is all because of the 1MB limitation of Bitcoin Core’s block size, causing it unable to accommodate to large number of transactions. Essentially Bitcoin Cash is a community-activated upgrade (otherwise known as a hard fork) of Bitcoin that increased the block size to 8MB, solving the scaling issues that plague Bitcoin Core today. Nov 16th 2018: A hashwar resulted in a split between Bitcoin SV and Bitcoin ABC

This overview is imported from market-data provider metadata. Project claims should be checked against the linked documentation and on-chain evidence.

Identity

Name: Bitcoin Cash
Symbol: BCH

Names and ticker symbols are not unique. Match the network and contract address against the project's documentation and a block explorer before identifying a token.

Sources and further reading

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Origins and identity

Bitcoin Cash emerged from the 2017 disagreement over how Bitcoin should scale. The BCH community records the split on August 1, 2017. Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash share earlier transaction history but operate as separate networks after the split, with their own consensus rules, market prices, and development decisions. BCH is not an alternate ticker for BTC, and a balance on one network does not imply that an exchange supports deposits of the other.

Payments and network mechanics

The network uses proof of work and a transaction-output model rooted in Bitcoin's design. Its community emphasizes base-layer payment capacity and has added features such as CashTokens. To understand a payment, follow the destination format, the selected network, the transaction's inclusion, and the receiving service's confirmation policy. A quick wallet notification and a deeply confirmed transfer represent different stages of assurance, even when a site advertises rapid payments.

Separating properties from promotion

Claims about low fees, merchant adoption, or decentralization require measurement and a stated period. A protocol supply rule does not guarantee purchasing power, and a payment-oriented design does not remove price volatility or custody risk. Different Bitcoin-derived networks can have similar-looking addresses and shared terminology, so check explicit BCH support before sending. For an encyclopedia profile, distinguish protocol facts, community goals, and current usage statistics rather than repeating statements that a project is the best or safest money.

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Overview

Overview

Identity

Sources and further reading

Origins and identity

Payments and network mechanics

Separating properties from promotion

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