History of Bitcoin Cash

In October 2008, Satoshi Nakamoto published the famous whitepaper entitled “Bitcoin: A Peer to Peer Electronic Cash System”. In 2009, he released the first bitcoin software that powered the network, and it operated smoothly for several years with low fees, and fast, reliable transactions.

Unfortunately, from 2016 to 2017, Bitcoin became increasingly unreliable and expensive. This was because the community could not reach a consensus on increasing the network capacity. Some of the developers did not understand and agree with Satoshi’s plan. Instead, they preferred Bitcoin to become a settlement layer.

By 2017, Bitcoin dominance had plummeted from 95% to as low as 40% as a direct result of the usability problems. Fortunately, a large portion of the Bitcoin community, including developers, investors, users, and businesses, still believed in the original vision of Bitcoin -- a low fee, peer-to-peer electronic cash system that could be used by all the people of the world.

On August 1st, 2017, we took the logical step of increasing the maximum block size, and Bitcoin Cash was born. Anyone who held Bitcoin at that time (block 478558) became an owner of Bitcoin Cash (BCH). The network now supports up to 32MB blocks with ongoing research to allow massive future increases.