It is well understood by now that Bitcoin Cash is the version of Bitcoin that upgraded the block size limits in order to scale its capacity on chain.
Throughout its life since 2017, Bitcoin Cash has done a number of successful system upgrades, with another one scheduled for May 2022.
In this short post, I want to give you a summary overview of these upgrades. This information is compiled from https://upgradespecs.bitcoincashnode.org/ .
It is important to remind that not every Bitcoin Cash upgrade is a hard fork. Some upgrades, like the past May 2021 one, do not include any changes that can result in a fork.
I wish read.cash would allow nice tables in its markup language, but currently it doesn't. So I have to include a graphical table here, suitable for copying to other platforms, and the textual form where the hyperlinks work, at the end.
Bitcoin Cash (BCH) network upgrades - graphical summary
Bitcoin Cash (BCH) network upgrades - textual summary
August 2017 (original UAHF)
Maximum block increased by a factor of 8 (from 1MB to 8MB)
Other basic scaling parameters (max txs in block, max sigops per block) adjusted to scale with block size
Added replay protection
Difficulty adjustment in case of hashrate drop (EDA)
Added new service bit (NODE_BITCOIN_CASH)
Enforcement of stricter transaction validation (SCRIPT_VERIFY_STRICTENC)
New difficulty adjustment algorithm (DAA)
Enforcement of LOW_S signatures (BIP 0146)
Enforcement of NULLFAIL (BIP 0146)
Blocksize increased by a factor of 4, to 32MB (original Satoshi client blocksize)
Increase OP_RETURN relay size to 223 total bytes
Added “automatic replay protection” (ARP)
(fork off old versions in next upgrade)
Enforce canonical transaction order (CTOR)
New opcodes: OP_CHECKDATASIG, OP_CHECKDATASIGVERIFY
Enforce minimum transaction size
Enforce "push only" rule for scriptSig
Enforce "clean stack" rule
Enable Schnorr signatures
Allow Segwit recovery
Enable Schnorr signatures for OP_CHECKMULTISIG(VERIFY)
Enforce minimal push and minimal number encoding rules in Script
Replace SigOps counting system with a new system (SigChecks)
New opcode: OP_REVERSEBYTES
Increase unconfirmed chain length limits from 25 to 50
Replace DAA with new difficulty adjustment algorithm: ASERT
Removal of the unconfirmed transaction chain limit
Allow multiple OP_RETURN outputs (but keep 223 byte limit for now)
May 2022 (upcoming)
This is great my friend. BCH developers are really working tirelessly for users to get the best. I don’t know why people shouldn’t adopt BCH it offers ridiculously low transaction fee and all.
My advice for BCH is to talk to big cooperation that deal with financial transactions and bargain with them to allow BCH in their platform, this would increase their value drastically.
Imagine if major hospitals accepts BCH, that would increase the worth.