Bitcoin Cash

Bitcoin Cash (BCH) is a peer-to-peer electronic cash system that emerged from a hard fork of Bitcoin on August 1, 2017. Created to fulfill Satoshi Nakamoto’s original vision for scalable, low-cost digital payments, BCH increases block sizes to enable faster and cheaper transactions for global commerce.

Like Bitcoin, BCH has a maximum supply of 21 million coins, a 10-minute block time, and uses SHA-256 Proof of Work. But it prioritizes usability for everyday payments, not digital gold.

Key Features

• Larger Blocks: BCH initially raised block limits from 1 MB to 8 MB, then to 32 MB in 2018, allowing high transaction throughput.
• Low Fees: Transactions cost less than $0.01 on average, making it ideal for micropayments.
• Quick Confirmations: Confirmations happen approximately every 10 minutes, consistent with Bitcoin.
  

BCH also features adjustable mining difficulty and follows the same halving cycle as Bitcoin (every 210,000 blocks). The last halving occurred in April 2024.

Ecosystem & Use Cases

Bitcoin Cash is focused on real-world peer-to-peer money. It’s used for merchant payments, remittances, online commerce, and micropayments—with many retailers and apps supporting it globally.

The community advocates for:

• Censorship-resistant money
• Permissionless development
• Practical adoption over speculation
  

Strengths vs. Challenges

Strengths:

• Cheaper, faster payments than BTC
• Same decentralized architecture
• Focused on usability, not store-of-value ideology
  

Challenges:

• Lower hashrate and security than BTC
• Less liquidity and institutional adoption
• Internal splits (e.g., Bitcoin SV fork in 2018)
  

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