Bitcoin vs. Bitcoin Cash: What's the Difference?

Bitcoin vs. Bitcoin Cash: An Overview

Bitcoin was the first cryptocurrency to achieve public awareness. It began as a payment method outside the control of governing bodies or other third parties. Bitcoin Cash is a cryptocurrency created from a Bitcoin blockchain fork, which occurs when users resist change or reprogram a blockchain to operate the way they want it to. Bitcoin Cash forked in 2017 after developers disagreed about the direction Bitcoin was taking.

Bitcoin

In July 2017, mining pools and companies representing roughly 80% to 90% of Bitcoin computing power voted to incorporate a technology known as segregated witness (SegWit). This fix made the amount of data needing verification in each block smaller by removing signature data from the block that needs to be processed in each transaction and placing it in the coinbase transaction field. Signature data was estimated to account for a large amount of data processed in each block, so this was not an insignificant technological shift.

The Bitcoin code was altered to account for this development, while at the same time, it was changed so that Bitcoin blocks were no longer limited to 1MB. Blocks gained a change called block weight, which could scale up to 4MB.

Bitcoin Cash

Bitcoin Cash is a different story. Bitcoin Cash was started by Bitcoin miners and developers equally concerned with the future of the cryptocurrency and its ability to scale effectively. However, these individuals had their reservations about the segregated witness feature. They felt that SegWit did not address the fundamental problem of scalability meaningfully, nor did it follow the roadmap initially outlined by Satoshi Nakamoto, the anonymous party who first proposed the blockchain technology behind cryptocurrency.

In August 2017, some miners and developers initiated a hard fork, effectively creating a new blockchain and currency: Bitcoin Cash (BCH). BCH has its own blockchain and specifications, including one crucial distinction from Bitcoin: it has an increased block size of 8 MB to accelerate the verification process. This block size has an adjustable size level, which ensures transaction verification speeds, regardless of the number of miners supporting it. This limit was increased to 32 MB in 2018.

Bitcoin Cash is thus—theoretically—able to process transactions more quickly than the Bitcoin network, meaning that wait times should be shorter and transaction processing fees could be lower. The Bitcoin Cash network is also believed to be able to handle many more transactions per second than the Bitcoin network. However, these claims have yet to be tested, as the blockchain rarely averages more than 250,000 daily transactions (compared to Bitcoin, which consistently has much more than that).

Special Considerations

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, creating yet another derivation of Bitcoin called Bitcoin SV. Bitcoin SV was created in an effort to stay true to the original vision for Bitcoin that Satoshi Nakamoto described in the Bitcoin white paper while making modifications to facilitate scalability and faster transaction speeds.

Bitcoin remains the most popular cryptocurrency in the world and the largest by market capitalization, so BCH users may find that liquidity and real-world usability are lower than they are for Bitcoin.

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 throughout its existence have an average of about 29.6KB, while BTC blocks have an average of about 1.6MB.

The Bottom Line

Bitcoin Cash evolved from the original Bitcoin release in 2017 after the community disagreed on how to fix scalability and speed issues. Bitcoin remains the top cryptocurrency by price and market capitalization, but Bitcoin Cash has a dedicated user base as well.

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