The history of bitcoin cash straight from the forum by oyedontuncaleb.

What is 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 chain to process more payments per second. This makes for faster, cheaper transactions and a much smoother user experience.

Why was Bitcoin Cash Created? 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. Basically speaking, "blocks" are groupings of new transactions that are added to the blockchain. In 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. Chart showing growth of transactions/block overtime. The artificially small blocksize led to network congestion as demand for bitcoin transactions has continued to grow. Remember, to be verified and processed, a bitcoin transaction must be included in a block. If blocks are full, your transaction must wait to be included in the next block, but the next block is already full because others paid a higher fee than you, etc. This congestion has led to an ever increasing "fee market" where users pay extra to "cut in line" and move their transactions to the top of the list of pending transactions, known as the mempool. At the time of publication, there are more than 280,000 unconfirmed Bitcoin Core transactions. To make matters worse, the developers of Bitcoin Core were either unwilling or unable to increase the blocksize to scale Bitcoin with demand. In their own words, the Bitcoin Core developers view this "fee market" and backlog of transactions as a positive trait of the Bitcoin Core network. This has caused many in the community to create alternative cryptocurrencies as frustration with Bitcoin Core grew due to increasing fees and transaction times taking longer and longer. As a result Bitcoin Core has gone from nearly 100% market share in the crypto space to below 50% at the time of publication. Enter Bitcoin Cash: A community-activated upgrade (otherwise known as a (hard fork) of Bitcoin that increased the block size to 8MB, solving the scaling issues that plague Bitcoin Core today. A flawed understanding of economics led to the failure of Bitcoin Core and the birth of Bitcoin Cash.

Blocksize? What is That Again? To describe how the block size limit affects the speed and cost of transactions on the blockchain, let us use the following example: It’s Saturday night and you’re about to visit the hottest club in town. Before this club became a big deal, it was a small local joint with a cool crowd, good music, and reasonably priced drinks in a small venue. All of a sudden, people started talking about this venue and telling their friends, and now everyone wants to get in. The problem is, the club is in a building that can only hold 2,500 people. In this analogy, think of the club as a "block", with limited storage capacity or size, and think of each patron as a bitcoin transaction. When the club (block) is full at 2,500 people (transactions), the bouncer is instructed to form a line and start charging an increasingly high cover charge (transaction fees) for entry. More and more people keep coming to the hottest club in town, and as of today, the situation has become so bad that the line of people waiting outside is approximately 270,000 people long and the average cover charge is as high as $140. You've been waiting patiently for hours to get in, but people willing to pay more than you keep jumping to the front of the line and are keeping the club full. Even worse, each person (transaction) is only allowed to bid on their cover charge once. When you first got in line, you thought that paying $20 would be enough to get you in quickly, but now several thousand more people have joined the line and said they would pay more than you. There is nothing you can do but wait until everyone paying more than you gets in and the bouncer gets around to letting you in. Despite this situation and much complaint from the community, the club management has stubbornly refused to move or build a larger building, and insist that a full club and ten times as many patrons waiting in line outside is not only good for business but that it would be impossible to expand their building to accommodate more patrons even if they wanted to. In Bitcoin Core, the mempool is the lineup of people waiting to get into the club and the transaction fees are the cover charge the bouncer requires to let you into the 2,500 person capacity club. At an average cost of as high as $140 per transaction and a line up of over 270,000 unconfirmed transactions, Bitcoin Core, a system that was created to explicitly be a “peer-to-peer-electronic cash system” has now become unusable for merchants and has priced out the majority of users in developed countries, let alone the entirety of users in smaller, developing countries.