So you’ve heard of Bitcoin, but what is Bitcoin Cash? They are both cryptocurrencies, but they are not the same.
Bitcoin has been around for more than ten years and since its inception the scalability of Bitcoin has been questioned. Back in 2017 when Bitcoin hit $20,000 the network was incredibly congested. Transactions would cost around $30 and they were slow too. While this hasn’t happened often, there have always been sceptics about Bitcoins scalability. That’s why so many different payment coins, like Bitcoin Cash, have been created, to try and fix the supposed problems of Bitcoin.
The route cause of Bitcoin’s scalability problem is the small block size of 1MB. It can only fit a limited number of transactions inside, resulting at a 4.4 transactions per second speed at best.
There was a group of prolific individuals in the cryptocurrency space that were sure that by increasing the block size of Bitcoin scalability would improve. There were two sides which couldn’t agree, which prevented the Bitcoin protocol from being updated to increase the block size.
As a result, a hard fork was proposed. This means that the Bitcoin codebase was effectively copied and recreated with a few changes, one of which being the larger block size. This happened in 2017 and all holders of Bitcoin received the same amount of Bitcoin Cash into their wallets.
The community is still very much divided, with both Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash having die hard fans who seemingly despise the other.
More block size problems
Just over a year later block size and scalability disagreements continued in the Bitcoin Cash camp and this prompted another hard fork, which created Bitcoin ABC, now known as Bitcoin Cash, and Bitcoin SV.
Bitcoin SV was aiming to increase scalability by further increasing block size so more transactions could be processed and placed into a block. Whereas Bitcoin ABC hoped to improve scalability by reordering how transactions were put into blocks.
Bitcoin cash – faced by controversial people?
One of the biggest gripes that Bitcoin Cash (and Bitcoin SV) naysayers have is that these cryptocurrencies are strangely influenced by extremely controversial crypto people with powerful influence. Roger Ver has been a keen supporter of Bitcoin Cash. Craig Wright, the man who claims to be Satoshi, was part of the team that drove the Bitcoin SV hard fork.
