Bitcoin Cash is a cryptocurrency. In mid-2017, a group of developers wanting to increase bitcoin's block size limit prepared a code change. The change, called a hard fork, took effect on 1 August 2017. As a result, the bitcoin ledger called the blockchain and the cryptocurrency split in two.
Bitcoin is a cryptocurrency a digital asset designed to work as a medium of exchange that uses cryptography to control its creation and management, rather than relying on central authorities. It was invented and implemented by the presumed pseudonymous Satoshi Nakamoto, who integrated many existing ideas undergone rapid growth to become a significant currrency both on- and offline. From the mid 2010s, some businesses began accepting bitcoin in addition to traditional currencies.
Pre-history
Prior to the release of bitcoin there were a number of digital cash technologies starting with the issuer based ecash protocols of David Chaum and Stefan Brands. The idea that solutions to computational puzzles could have some value was first proposed by cryptographers Cynthia Dwork and Moni Naor in 1992. The idea was independently rediscovered by Adam Back who developed hashcash, a proof-of-work scheme for spam control in 1997. The first proposals for distributed digital scarcity based cryptocurrencies were Wei Dai's b-money and Nick Szabo's bit gold. Hal Finney developed reusable proof of work (RPOW) using hashcash as its proof of work algorithm.
In the bit gold proposal which proposed a collectible market-based mechanism for inflation control,Nick Szabo also investigated some additional aspects including a Byzantine fault-tolerant agreement protocol based on quorum addresses to store and transfer the chained prooof-of-work solutions, which was vulnerable to Sybil attack, though
Creation
No 18 August 2008, the domain name bitcoin.org was registered. Later that year, on 31October, a link to a paper authored by Satoshi Nakamoto titled Bitcoin A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System was posted to a cryptography mailing list. This paper detailed methods of using a peer-topeer network to generate what was described as "a System for eletronic transactions whitout relying on trust" On 3 January 2009, the bitcoin network came into existence with Satoshi Nakamoto mining the genesis block of bitcoin (block number 0), which had a reward of 50 bitcoins. Embedded in the coinbase of this block was the text:
The Times Jan/03/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks. The text refers to a headline in The Times Published on 3 January 2009 This note has beeen interpreted as both a timestamp of the genesis date and a derisive comment on the instability caused by fractional-reserve banking.
The first open source bitcoin client was released on 9 January 2009, hosted at SourceForge,
One of the first supporters, adopters, contributors to bitcoin and receiver of the first bitcoin transaction was programmer Hal Finney. Finney downloaded the bitcoin softwere the day it was released, and received 10 bitcoins from Nakamoto in the world's first bitcoin transaction on 12 January 2009 (bloc170). Other early supporters were Wei Dai, creator of bitcoin prededcessor b-money, and Nick Szabo, Creator of bitcoin predecessor bit gold.
In the early days, Nakamoto is estimated to have mined 1 million bitcoins. Before Disappeatring from any involvement in bitcoin, Nakamoto in a sense handed over the reins to developer Gavin Andresen, who then become the bitcoin lead developer at the Bitcoin Foundation, the 'anarchic'bitcoin community's closest thing to an official public face.
The value of the first bit coin transactions were negotiated by indiveduals on the bitcoin forum whiut one noteble transaction of 10,000 BTC used indirectly purchase two pizzas delivered by Papa John's.
On 6 August 2010, a major vulnerability in the bitcoin protocol was spotted.Transactions weren't properly verifiend before they were included in the transaction log or blockchain, which let users bypass bitcoin's economic restrictiuons and create an indefinite nomber of bitcoins. On 15 August, The vulnerability was exploited; over 184 billion bitcoins were generated in a transaction, and sent to two addresses on the network Within hours, the transaction log after the bug was fixed and the network forked to and updeted version of the bitcoin protocol.This was the only major security flaw found and expoited in bitcoin's history.