Since Bitcoin emerged,over years its adoption had been taking place aiming at going complete mainstream,however the technology has been facing some challenges in handling numerous transactions. This led to creation for an opportunity to solve some of these problems which include increased amount of time to process transactions resulting to delays in completing a transaction. The cost of transactions on blockchain also kept on increasing thus bitcoin becoming more expensive to transact. This situation led to the urge of improving the ecosystem and thus the creation of Bitcoin Cash in 2017 by some developers whom suggested two ideas.
The first idea was changing block format. Think this way; recording transactions on a piece of paper would actually capture the wallet address of participants of a transaction,that is sender and receiver as well as individual signatures for each transaction.This would use up a lot of space on a paper. Developers thus suggested need to separate the one sheet of paper into two,one would carry adresses and the other one contain only signatures creating more space on the paper and thus more transactions would be processed
The second idea was increasing the block size though the idea wasn't highly welcomed.Though changing the format of each block would help out in transaction speed,it would only serve for a temporary solution as the network increases over time,it would require upgrading.Therefore they decided the best way to solve the transaction speed problem was to increase the maximum block size.
Using the above example of transactions being recorded in a piece of paper,take it to be 10mm long, assuming it's the bitcoin block size that amounts to 1MB. Developers suggested that increasing the block size would process more transactions.Thus they came up with the idea of increasing the piece of paper by 2 times;thats to 20mm,for the case of bitcoin to 2MB. This idea also would allow for maximum block size be increased by 8 times if it was of need in future. Overall idea was for bitcoin to become everyday system of payment it would need larger block sizes, thus becoming more effective and efficient than existing methods such as gold and money.
The developers had a consultative input process which attracted for a vote and the consensus arrived at from idea 1 idea 2 was that idea 1 was the way to go. The need to do a soft fork inorder for bitcoin blockchain system to make change arose.However the team of developers for idea 2 felt not okey with it and thus decided to do a hard fork and therefore created Bitcoin Cash
