Pursuing Bitcoin’s original goal of a transactional currency, Bitcoin Cash is the rejection of the Bitcoin Core philosophy that Bitcoin should be a settlement layer. Bitcoin Core demands that full nodes be within reach of inexpensive hardware and ordinary internet connections. Its stance based on the rationale that as it becomes harder to run a node, the fewer people will run them. This may force mining to further consolidate potentially jeopardizing Bitcoin’s censorship resistance. Ultimately, the current prevailing view is that the Bitcoin blockchain must remain compact and efficiently used for sake of conserving the public good.
The Bitcoin Core developers claim that Satoshi was operating under assumptions that no longer hold true given the consolidation of mining due to ASICs and mining pools. The Bitcoin Cash community believes that a network with more transactional throughput and technological improvements — both hardware and software — will contribute to decentralization by attracting new participants willing to overcome the hurdles of participation.
Bitcoin Cash takes seriously the ambition of Satoshi to create a system that can scale to Visa level transactions without the need for secondary layers. Bitcoin Cash dismisses the notion that average users will want to run a node and believe that it is much more important to have affordable transactions than the ability to easily validate the entire ledger for oneself. Bitcoin Cash is designed to be Simple Payment Verification (SPV) friendly. SPV means that payments can be verified as included in the main chain without validating the entire blockchain on the client’s device.