Bitcoin Cash

Bitcoin Cash (BCH) is a cryptocurrency that began as a hard fork of Bitcoin. It was released on 1 August 2017 as a modified version of the Bitcoin Core software, with a protocol upgrade aimed at on-chain capacity.

The main technical change is a higher block size limit, moved from 1MB to 8MB. The project says this lets miners on the BCH chain handle up to eight times as many payments per second as Bitcoin, which it associates with quicker and cheaper transfers.

Its stated goal is to restore the qualities of money found in the original Bitcoin software. The project's supporters say Bitcoin Core became unsuitable for payments because of high fees and slow transfer times, which they attribute to its 1MB block limit.

Bitcoin Cash also takes a different approach to upgrades. It does not use Segregated Witness as a soft fork, and protocol changes are made mainly through hard forks that leave Bitcoin's original economic rules unchanged. On 16 Nov 2018, a hash war led the chain to divide into Bitcoin SV and Bitcoin ABC.