Bitcoin Cash price (BCH)

The cryptocurrency Bitcoin Cash (BCH) has been around since August 1st, 2017. Technically, it is a version of Bitcoin (BTC) that differs from the original in certain aspects, but remains identical in many others. The original Bitcoin was copied, so to speak, but then changed in one central technical property – the block size.

The original Bitcoin BTC has been around since 2009 and is based on its own blockchain. The blockchain is a huge database in which all transactions made with the Bitcoin currency are recorded. For the purpose of documenting a transfer transaction, the central information for this is stored in so-called blocks, stored forever and unalterably encrypted. As soon as a block is “full”, it is cryptographically sealed and a new one is generated, adding a new element to the block “chain”.

Over time, the number of BTC transactions has increased at a faster and faster rate. This led to a discussion within the Bitcoin community about whether this block-to-block principle could potentially lead to the chain becoming too long. This is because a single block can only store data of up to 1 Megabyte (MB), which corresponds to roughly 3,000 transactions. Too many blocks, it is feared, may slow down the handling of the system too much.

A suggestion was later made to update the Bitcoin software and increase the block size to 8 MB. The Bitcoin blockchain’s software can, in fact, be changed at any time and this happens recurrently. Because it was published under an open source license and is available at any time, anyone could, theoretically, change the software of the BTC blockchain. The question is only whether this change will be carried out, i.e. whether the operators of the Bitcoin IT infrastructure will install this new version on their servers. The new version can only become a reality if more than half of them do so. Those who do not do so will then no longer be part of the network.

This is exactly what happened with Bitcoin Cash. The worldwide Bitcoin community couldn’t agree on the size of the blocks, so a spin-off occurred. This resulted in a new cryptocurrency, created on August 1st, 2017: a Bitcoin with large blocks = Bitcoin Cash (BCH). The name is derived from its developers’ claim to speed up transactions with the increased block size. Only in this way can Bitcoin be used efficiently as a daily means of payment, i.e. as cash, while the old version is too slow.