What is BITCOIN CASH(BCC/BCH)
Bitcoin is no doubt one of the most incredible innovations in the recent past. However, it has also faced a lot of criticism for having some scalability issues which gave rise to a lot of debates which are motivated by vested interests as well as ideologically. Finally, bitcoin underwent certain improvements and changes through a hard fork on August 1, 2017, which gave birth to Bitcoin Cash.
Bitcoin Cash is a peer-to-peer crypto cash which is fully decentralized and consists of no central bank and trusted third parties for operating. Sound money was introduced to the world by Bitcoin Cash, which also fulfills the original promise of Bitcoin as “Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash”. It empowers the merchants and users with low fees and reliable confirmations along with unrestricted growth, global adoption, permissionless innovation, and decentralized development. All Bitcoin holders as of block 478558 are automatically the owners of Bitcoin Cash too. Bitcoin Cash community welcomes everybody to join them as they move forward in creating BCH accessible to the whole world.
In order to solve the scalability issues related to the Bitcoin, it went through Hard Fork to resolve those issues and improve the working of the cryptocurrency.
What is Hard Fork?
Hard Fork is parting off from Blockchain, In a hardfork, the new coin will have its own existence with a new blockchain which will have no connection to original coin and blockchain from the point they are parted/forked, but they share the blockchain till than. The concept of hardfork is not backward compatible. Once it is utilized there is absolutely no going back no matter what the circumstances are. Hard Fork idea doesn’t allow the users to get access to any of the new updates or interact with other users of the new system until and unless that user joins the upgraded version of the blockchain.
Bitcoin Cash (BCH) is a lot like Bitcoin but has some very little differences which are noticeable :
- The blocksize is 8 MB.
- It won’t have segwit.
- It won’t have the “replace by fee” feature.
- It will have replay and wipeout protection.
- It offers a way to adjust the proof-of-work difficulty quicker than the normal 2016 block difficulty adjustment interval found in Bitcoin.
Since BCH is a result of a hardfork, everyone who owns BTC gets the equal amount of coins in BCH if they have a proof for that they didn’t have their BTC in exchanges and were in possession of their private keys at the time of the hardfork.
BCHABC Price Graph.
So now let’s go through certain interesting features of Bitcoin Cash:
On Chain Scalability – The Nakamoto roadmap for global adoption with on-chain scaling is followed by Bitcoin Cash. The blocksize limit has been made adjustable at the first step along with increasing default of 8MB.
New Transaction Signatures – Replay protection is provided by a new SigHash type along with other features like improvement of hardware wallet security and also eliminating the quadratic hashing problem.
New Difficulty Adjustment Algorithm (DAA) – by the difficulty adjustment of Responsive Proof-of-Work, miners are allowed to migrate from the legacy of Bitcoin chain as they desire while providing protection against hashrate fluctuations.
Decentralized Development – The future is secure because of the software implementations provided by multiple independent teams of developers. Bitcoin Cash is resistant to attacks, both political and social, on protocol development and it cannot be controlled by a single group or project. The bitcoin-ml mailing list is a great platform for putting proposals for changes which require coordination among development teams.
When it first started most exchanges were reluctant to take up BCH, but now more and more exchanges are accepting it. This, in turn, gives it credibility which increases its value.
The total bitcoin cash existing till date is 16,914,467BCH approx. with a market capitalization of $27,156,755,823 USD. The current value of a single bitcoin cash is approximately around $1605.53 USD which keeps on changing very frequently at every minute of the day. The maximum amount of bitcoin cash that can be generated is 21 million coins which in itself is a very huge amount. All eyes are on crypto-markets these days because of Bitcoin cash which posses the highest value of $1900 USD approx till date.
Following are the names of some wallets and exchanges which are supporting BCH:
Exchanges :
ViaBTC, Bittrex, Kraken, Bitfinex, BTCbox, Korbit and many more.
Ledger, Trezor etc.
Bitcoin Cash was further Hardforked to create BCHABC and BCHSV , read about that here.
