Bitcoin vs Bitcoin Cash

what is bitcoin cash

By maxing its total possible assets at 21 million coins, scarcity is written into the code, ultimately driving the token’s market value. “Bitcoin Cash is used as a form of digital currency for making transactions and storing value,” said Alex Faliushin, co-founder and CEO at crypto-lending blockchain pascal’s mining calculator 2020 platform CoinLoan. Bitcoin Cash shares many of the same features as Bitcoin, but has faster transaction times and lower fees. Though Bitcoin might be better known, Bitcoin Cash has supporters who believe that Bitcoin Cash is closer to the original purpose and vision of the Bitcoin project.

what is bitcoin cash

Table of Contents

  1. Bitcoin Cash expanded the block size to 8 MB initially, and later to 32 MB, which allows it to process over 100 transactions per second.
  2. On August 1st, 2017, we took the logical step of increasing the maximum block size, and Bitcoin Cash was born.
  3. It has consistently maintained a position in the top 50 cryptocurrencies by market cap.

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What Is Bitcoin Cash Used For?

In the process of planning your strategy and researching Bitcoin Cash, consider setting limits on the losses you can tolerate. Before you buy BCH, get to know both the market and the exchange as intimately as possible. Ultimately, you want to buy low and sell high (if selling is part of your overall strategy), so it’s imperative to monitor the market to see when it’s most beneficial for you to get involved. When the money arrives in your account, you can use those funds to specify how much BCH you want to buy and when you want to buy it. Anonymous — As with most cryptocurrencies, you can buy, sell, and trade BCH with complete anonymity.

Similarities Between Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash

The debate about scalability, transaction processing, and blocks has continued beyond the fork that led to Bitcoin Cash. In November 2018, for example, the Bitcoin Cash network experienced its own hard fork, resulting in the creation of yet another derivation of Bitcoin called Bitcoin SV. Bitcoin’s blockchain had scalability issues because it could not handle the increased number of transactions. The confirmation time and fees for a transaction on Bitcoin’s blockchain surged. Transactions queued up, waiting for confirmation, because blocks could not handle the increase in size for transactions. Whether your bitcoin cash is secure depends on proper asset management, secure wallets, and an awareness of crypto scams and threats such as phishing.

How Is Bitcoin Cash Different From Bitcoin?

This includes account controls, strong encryption, operational security, and enhanced security options. Additional points were given for wallets that provided additional features like in-app browsers, Bluetooth, near-field communication, etc. The comments, opinions, and analyses expressed on Investopedia are for informational purposes only. As of the date this article was written, the author does not own cryptocurrency. Despite exiting the Bitcoin community over six years ago, Bitcoin Cash, the network, and the community are still juxtaposed with the original Bitcoin.

On the last day of June 2023, Bitcoin Cash hit a yearly high of $320, a little shy of a 200% increase from $110, its opening price on the first day of the same month. The Bitcoin Cash market cap has also blown past $6 billion during this time. Daily trading volume has also grown from an average of $52 million to over a billion dollars in the closing weeks of the month, an over 20X increase. https://cryptolisting.org/ The month of June has been an interesting one for the Bitcoin Cash community and investors. But the Bitcoin Cash network had developed smart contract features before this time, supporting smart contracts and side chains. Smart contracts on Bitcoin cash are developed with CashScript, a specially developed smart contract language for building applications on the Bitcoin Cash network.

Since that time, Bitcoin Cash has grown into one of the top 15 coins in the market today. The network fee for a typical Bitcoin Cash transaction is less than one penny. If you want to convert your BCH into fiat currency, such as US dollars, you can do that through merchant processors for a cost that is still much lower than credit card processing. Proof of work is one of several consensus mechanisms, which are algorithms that synchronize a network into agreement by maintaining a single data set. Like its predecessor, Bitcoin Cash runs on an open-source, proof-of-work protocol that operates on a distributed network of blockchain nodes, or moderating servers.

They use the same consensus mechanism and have capped their supply at 21 million coins. Even with an increased block size implemented to decrease transaction times and improve usability, BCH doesn’t experience near the popularity and volume of Bitcoin. BCH block sizes on Nov. 1, 2023, ranged from a few hundred bytes to about 7 MB, while BTC blocks ranged consistently from 1.1 MB to about 1.8 MB. Typically, a hard fork takes place when groups of miners and developers can’t agree on updates to the software governing a particular digital token.