The History of Bitcoin Cash

Bitcoin Cash (BCH) is an upgraded version of the Bitcoin Core software. It was released on August 1st, 2017. The title page of the original Bitcoin Whitepaper by Satoshi Nakamoto, 2008[/caption] The main upgrade offered by Bitcoin Cash is an increase of the blocksize limit to 8mb. This effectively allows miners on the BCH chains to process more payments per second. This makes for faster, cheaper transactions and a much smoother user experience.

Bitcoin Cash was created to bring back the essential qualities of money inherent in the original Bitcoin software. Over the years, these qualities were filtered out of Bitcoin Core and progress was stifled by various people, organizations, and companies involved in Bitcoin protocol development. The result is that Bitcoin Core is currently unusable as money due to increasingly high fees per transactions and transfer times taking hours to days. This is all because of the problems created by Bitcoin Core's blocks being full. Bitcoin Core developer and Blockstream CTO is one of many "experts" who considers a slow, expensive network to be ideal[/caption] Basically speaking, "blocks" are groupings of new transactions that are added to the blockchain.

n Bitcoin, transactions are processed block by block. Bitcoin was designed to target 6 blocks per hour, or one every ten minutes. Years ago, an artificial limit to the size of blocks was added to the Bitcoin Core code to prevent a possible attack vector where a mass number of transactions could weaken the network. At the time, transactions were free to make, so an attacker could send a huge number of transactions between his own wallets, forcing everyone else on the network to download and store large amounts of data. The block size limit was arbitrarily set at 1MB (i.e., the size of storage offered by a floppy disk from the mid-1980s). At the time, this was still thousands of times higher than the actual usage of the network demanded. It is clear that the block size limit was never meant to stifle growth of the network, but merely to defend against a theoretical attack vector. User adoption of Bitcoin began slowly, and it wasn’t until 2012 that the blockchain was processing 250 transactions per block, or approximately 1,500 transactions per hour. It took two more years for this number to double, and by 2014 the Bitcoin network was processing 500 transactions per block. Today, the Bitcoin Core network is at maximum capacity and processes approximately 2,500 transactions per block.

Is Bitcoin Cash Cheaper to Use than Bitcoin Core?

Yes. Because transaction fees in both versions of Bitcoin are measured in satoshis-per-byte (a unit of Bitcoin is divisible to 8 decimal places and the smallest unit is called a “satoshi”) the way you have to accurately measure Bitcoin fees is not in dollars, but in satoshis. Because Bitcoin Core blocks are always full and there’s a large line up of people, currently, the bouncer is charging more than 900 satoshis per byte for inclusion into a block. At the time of writing, it costs more than $30 to make a single Bitcoin transaction. By comparison, Bitcoin Cash’s average fee is 19 satoshis per byte. With Bitcoin Cash, you can also set your fees manually as low as 2 satoshis per byte and be included into the next block, because there is plenty of room for everyone who wants to send a transaction

Despite dramatic increase to fees and rapid market share loss Bitcoin Core developers refused to increase the blocksize[/caption] Bitcoin Core fees are above $30 as of December 21, 2017. This means that an address with less than $30 in it will be unusable as one must pay at least $30 in fees to even broadcast the transaction. Imagine trying to buy a sandwich for $7 and being told by the cashier, "That will be $37, please." Even an address with $100 on it will lose a whopping _thirty percent of their money as soon as they try to use it. Imagine you give your friend a $100 bill, but once it changes hands it's only worth $70 to them. As soon as they use it, it becomes worth only $40. This is the current state of Bitcoin Core, completely broken