Bitcoin Cash- The Scalable Bitcoin
- Tanishq Wadhwani
- May 16, 2021
- 10 min read
Twitter: The original protocol, with a focus on stability, scalability, security, safe instant transactions, and global adoption.
Bitcoin Cash (BCH) holds an important place in the history of altcoins because it is one of the earliest and most successful hard forks of the original Bitcoin. In the cryptocurrency world, a fork takes place as the result of debates and arguments between developers and miners. Due to the decentralized nature of digital currencies, wholesale changes to the code underlying the token or coin at hand must be made due to general consensus; the mechanism for this process varies according to the particular cryptocurrency.
When different factions can’t come to an agreement, sometimes the digital currency is split, with the original chain remaining true to its original code and the new chain beginning life as a new version of the prior coin, complete with changes to its code.
BCH began its life in August of 2017 as a result of one of these splits. The debate that led to the creation of BCH had to do with the issue of scalability; the Bitcoin network has a limit on the size of blocks: one megabyte (MB). BCH increases the block size from one MB to eight MB, with the idea being that larger blocks can hold more transactions within them, and therefore the transaction speed would be increased. It also makes other changes, including the removal of the Segregated Witness protocol which impacts block space.
The Story
Over the years Bitcoin has grown into a worldwide phenomenon. As Bitcoin grew in popularity it became apparent that the Bitcoin community needed to solve a scaling issue. The problem was, as more people used the network, the limited size of the 1MB blocks within the blockchain started to become full. This lead to less reliable transactions and much higher transaction fees, which undermines the ease of use of the entire system. This issue led to a rift within the Bitcoin community who were conflicted as to the best way to solve this scaling issue.
A small but vocal group felt the need to maintain 1MB block sizes, and work on off-chain settlement layers - still in development today. They wanted to shift Bitcoin away from electronic cash into a collectible settlement layer. This group consisted mainly of developers from the Blockstream Company.
During this pivotal time, this group also took part in wide spread censorship across the major Bitcoin discussion channels, removing any dissenting opinions or contributors. The other side wanted to increase the block size, allowing for more transactions per block. This instant, on-chain upgrade would keep transactions reliable and fees low, as the blocks would no longer be full. Their argument was unfortunately met with censorship and irrational propaganda, and it became clear Bitcoin as a usable digital cash for the world was in trouble.
On August 1, 2017, the developers of Bitcoin-ABC initiated a hard fork of the Bitcoin blockchain to increase the block size. This new chain had 8MB blocks and was called Bitcoin Cash. The hard fork was executed without any issues, and the Bitcoin Cash upgrade made Bitcoin usable as cash again. Transaction fees are low, transaction times fast, and most importantly the Bitcoin Cash community is united in the original vision of Bitcoin as cash for the world.
The BCH and BTC camps have gone their separate ways, but the contentious debates rage on.
Bitcoin vs. Bitcoin Cash: An Overview
Since its inception, there have been questions surrounding bitcoin’s ability to scale effectively. Transactions involving the digital currency bitcoin are processed, verified, and stored within a digital ledger known as a blockchain. Blockchain is a revolutionary ledger-recording technology. It makes ledgers far more difficult to manipulate because the reality of what has transpired is verified by majority rule, not by an individual actor. Additionally, this network is decentralized; it exists on computers all over the world.
The problem with blockchain technology in the Bitcoin network is that it’s slow, especially in comparison to banks that deal with credit card transactions. Popular credit card company Visa, Inc., for instance, processes close to 150 million transactions per day, averaging roughly 1,700 transactions per second. The company's capability actually far surpasses that, at 65,000 transaction messages per second.
How many transactions can the bitcoin network process per second? Seven. Transactions can take several minutes or more to process. As the network of bitcoin users has grown, waiting times have become longer because there are more transactions to process without a change in the underlying technology that processes them.
Ongoing debates around bitcoin’s technology have been concerned with this central problem of scaling and increasing the speed of the transaction verification process. Developers and cryptocurrency miners have come up with two major solutions to this problem. The first involves making the amount of data that needs to be verified in each block smaller, thus creating transactions that are faster and cheaper, while the second requires making the blocks of data bigger, so that more information can be processed at one time. Bitcoin Cash (BCH) developed out of these solutions. Below, we'll take a closer look at how bitcoin and BCH differ from one another.
Bitcoin
In July 2017, mining pools and companies representing roughly 80 percent to 90 percent of bitcoin computing power voted to incorporate a technology known as a segregated witness, or Segwit3 This fix makes the amount of data that needs to be verified in each block smaller by removing signature data from the block of data that needs to be processed in each transaction and having it attached in an extended block. Signature data has been estimated to account for up to 65 percent of data processed in each block, so this is not an insignificant technological shift.
Talk of doubling the size of blocks from 1 MB to 2 MB ramped up in 2017 and 2018, and, as of February 2019, the average block size of bitcoin increased to 1.305 MB, surpassing previous records. By January 2020, however, block size has declined back toward 1 MB on average.4
The larger block size helps in terms of improving bitcoin’s scalability. In September 2017, research released by cryptocurrency exchange BitMex showed that SegWit implementation had helped increase the block size, amid a steady adoption rate for the technology. Proposals to both implement Segwit and double the block size were known as Segwit2x.
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 adoption of a segregated witness technology. They felt as though SegWit2x did not address the fundamental problem of scalability in a meaningful way, nor did it follow the roadmap initially outlined by Satoshi Nakamoto, the anonymous party that first proposed the blockchain technology behind cryptocurrency.
Furthermore, the process of introducing SegWit2x as the road forward was anything but transparent, and there were concerns that its introduction undermined the decentralization and democratization of the currency.
In August 2017, some miners and developers initiated what is known as a hard fork, effectively creating a new currency: BCH. BCH has its own blockchain and specifications, including one very important distinction from bitcoin. BCH has implemented an increased block size of 8 MB to accelerate the verification process, with an adjustable level of difficulty to ensure the chain’s survival and transaction verification speed, regardless of the number of miners supporting it. In 2018, the maximum block size for BCH was increased 4x to 32MB, but actual block sizes on Bitcoin cash have remained only a small fraction of the 32MB limit.
Bitcoin Cash is thus able to process transactions more quickly than the Bitcoin network, meaning that wait times are shorter and transaction processing fees tend to be lower. The Bitcoin Cash network can handle many more transactions per second than the Bitcoin network can. However, with the faster transaction verification time comes downsides as well. One potential issue with the larger block size associated with BCH is that security could be compromised relative to the Bitcoin network. Similarly, bitcoin remains the most popular cryptocurrency in the world as well as the largest by market cap, so users of BCH may find that liquidity and real-world usability is lower than for bitcoin.
The debate about scalability, transaction processing, and blocks has continued beyond the fork which led to Bitcoin Cash. In November of 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 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 also making modifications to facilitate scalability and faster transaction speeds. The debate about the future of bitcoin appears to show no signs of being resolved.
Who Needs Two?
Bitcoin outgrew its blockchain, which was made from small blocks that got clogged as Bitcoin’s popularity surged. As more people joined, the system became harder to scale. Both transaction times and transaction costs grew so high that Bitcoin’s chief miners and producers worried about its viability.
They responded by creating what is known as the Hard Fork, a deviation from the original Bitcoin chain. The new chain had bigger blocks that could be scaled to accommodate Bitcoin’s ever-growing user base. Since it sped up processing times and reduced costs enough to let Bitcoin be used just like cash, the only fitting name was Bitcoin Cash.
In 2017, the Bitcoin project and its community split in two over concerns about Bitcoin’s scalability. The result was a hard fork which created Bitcoin Cash, a new cryptocurrency considered by supporters to be the legitimate continuation of the Bitcoin project as peer-to-peer electronic cash. All Bitcoin holders at the time of the fork (block 478,558) automatically became owners of Bitcoin Cash. Bitcoin, which was invented by the pseudonymous Satoshi Nakomoto remains a separate cryptocurrency.
Unlike Bitcoin BTC, Bitcoin Cash aims to scale so it can meet the demands of a global payment system. At the time of the split, the Bitcoin Cash block size was increased from 1MB to 8MB. An increased block size means Bitcoin Cash can now handle significantly more transactions per second (TPS) while keeping fees extremely low, solving the issues of payment delays and high fees experienced by some users on the Bitcoin BTC network.
As of November 2020, Bitcoin Cash has a block size of 32MB.
What is Bitcoin Cash?
Bitcoin Cash brings sound money to the world, fulfilling the original promise of Bitcoin as "Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash". Merchants and users are empowered with low fees and reliable confirmations. The future shines brightly with unrestricted growth, global adoption, permissionless innovation, and decentralized development.
It is a peer-to-peer electronic cash system that aims to become sound global money with fast payments, micro fees, privacy, and high transaction capacity (big blocks). In the same way that physical money, such as a dollar bill, is handed directly to the person being paid, Bitcoin Cash payments are sent directly from one person to another.
As a permissionless, decentralized cryptocurrency, Bitcoin Cash requires no trusted third parties and no central bank. Unlike traditional fiat money, Bitcoin Cash does not depend on monetary middlemen such as banks and payment processors. Transactions cannot be censored by governments or other centralized corporations. Similarly, funds cannot be seized or frozen — because financial third parties have no control over the Bitcoin Cash network.
How Bitcoin Cash Works
To reduce spam and fraud, Bitcoin was originally launched with something called a 1MB block. As the currency became increasingly popular, the capacity limit meant the transaction times for using or buying Bitcoin started to lag tremendously. Bitcoin began as a payment system but evolved into an investment.
Lagging transaction times limited the volume of Bitcoin transactions that could occur per second, hindering the ability for Bitcoin to scale. This limitation is why Bitcoin Cash was developed with a significantly bigger block, allowing 25,000 transactions a day.
Bitcoin Cash has an 32MB block. Think of it as an off-ramp on the Bitcoin highway. That off-ramp leads to an express lane carrying only high-capacity vehicles. This allows many more transactions per second to be processed on Bitcoin Cash than on Bitcoin itself.
How do you mine Bitcoin Cash?
Mining is the process in which new Bitcoin Cash transactions are confirmed and new blocks are added to the Bitcoin Cash blockchain. Miners use computing power and electricity to solve complex puzzles. By doing so, they gain the ability to produce new blocks of transactions. If one of their blocks is accepted by the network, the miner, or mining pool, earns a block reward in the form of newly-issued Bitcoin Cash.
Mining is highly competitive. As the price of Bitcoin Cash in the marketplace rises, more miners are incentivized to bring more hash rate into the ever-increasing miner competition to produce blocks and have them accepted by the Bitcoin Cash network. More miners make the network more secure by increasing and distributing the hash rate. This prevents a single miner from having control over the network.
Anyone can mine Bitcoin Cash. Mining requires specialized hardware called mining equipment, which can either be bought or rented. Miners also need to run a full node software (with the majority of miners currently running BCHN) to build blocks and connect to the rest of the Bitcoin Cash network. Mining can be done independently but miners often pool their hash rate together and share proportionally in the earned block rewards.
History
Bitcoin Cash is a cryptocurrency launched in 2017 by forking the Bitcoin blockchain and changed the size limit of blocks added to the blockchain. On August 1, 2017, Amaury Séchet released the first Bitcoin Cash software implementation. The new cryptocurrency was supported a few high-profile early bitcoin investors like Roger Ver who claimed that Bitcoin’s one-megabyte block size limit would inhibit its ability to scale and accrue value as more investors and users adopt cryptocurrency. Bitcoin Cash sparked a trend of creating new cryptocurrencies by forking the Bitcoin blockchain. Measured by market capitalization and active users, Bitcoin Cash is the largest Bitcoin fork. In November 2018, Bitcoin Cash split into two cryptocurrencies: Bitcoin Cash and Bitcoin SV. In November 2020, Bitcoin Cash split into two more blockchains, iBitcoin Cash (BCHA) and Bitcoin Cash Node (BCHN).
Bright Future
Bitcoin Cash has multiple independent teams of developers providing software implementations. They’re already making great innovations and upgrades to make Bitcoin Cash the best money in the world. The decentralized development also keeps Bitcoin Cash resistant to political and social attacks on protocol development.
Since the fork in 2017, Bitcoin Cash developers have already upgraded the blocksize to 32MB blocks. There are many new and exciting projects utilizing the Bitcoin Cash network. With a strong roadmap, talented developers, and a clear vision for what Bitcoin should be, the future is bright with Bitcoin Cash.
Is Bitcoin Cash a Good Investment?
If you can stomach the roller-coaster volatility of Bitcoin, if you can keep up with its complex and always-evolving technology and you’re OK with the fact that it’s not backed by any institution that you recognize, then you could certainly make an argument for Bitcoin Cash. Like Bitcoin itself, Bitcoin Cash offers the potential for otherworldly profits, but also like Bitcoin, high risks, big bubbles and crazy price swings are part of the package.
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