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What is Bitcoin Cash?
Bitcoin Cash (BCH) is a cryptocurrency that split off from Bitcoin in August 2017. The Bitcoin fork, which gave rise to Bitcoin Cash, was largely due to disagreements between the two major stakeholders of the original bitcoin protocol: miners and developers.
A hard fork occurs when there are irreconcilable differences among different groups of people involved with an open-source project. These disagreements give rise to competing versions of what should go into the next update or version of the software. Forks are not inherently bad; they can be used as a way for different communities within one body to work together on separate parts without stepping on each other’s toes while still sharing common goals.
The name “Bitcoin” has become so ingrained in the cryptocurrency community that it’s become almost impossible to change. To avoid holding on to this name, which has caused some confusion regarding its use in media, Bitcoin Cash is frequently referred to as Bcash or BCH.
While BTC has managed to surge to a place near to it’s all-time high, BCH has remained 65% lower than it’s all time-high. This lack of correlation has also been seen with Ethereum and Ethereum Classic.
Bitcoin Cash now ranks as the 21st leading cryptocurrency according to CoinGecko. Newer coins such as Terra, Avalanche and Algorand have overtaken BCH on the leaderboard.
Since Bitcoin Cash is a fork of Bitcoin, those who held Bitcoins at the time Bitcoin Cash launched, automatically became owners of BCH.
Bitcoin Cash’s advantages over Bitcoin are:
– Increased block size from Bitcoin’s one megabyte to eight megabytes.
– Transaction fees are much lower on Bitcoin Cash than on Bitcoin.
– The mining process is simpler on Bitcoin Cash, which makes it more decentralized.