What is BitcoinCash?

#BitcoinCash #Club1BCH

Bitcoin cash (BCH) is electronic cash that flows quickly and cheaply from person to person. These characteristics convinced many investors to use it for their transactions. It is a cryptocurrency that is considered a fork of Bitcoin (BTC), and it cannot be forgotten that Bitcoin is the first and most well-known cryptocurrency. For its part, Bitcoin Cash proposes a different scaling to the Bitcoin base code whose main difference with this cryptocurrency is the size of the block.

It was launched on the market on August 1, 2017 after multiple tests on its operation and with its most outstanding feature: a blockchain length of 8 MB. In its beginning it greatly surpassed Bitcoin whose length was limited to 1 MB. Until today it has evolved, with more than 7 updates and has increased the chained unconfirmed transaction limit from 25 to 50 per second. This speed places it in an important place within cryptocurrencies.

Bitcoin cash BCH is a type of cryptocurrency that emerged as a fork of Bitcoin. With this cryptocurrency, a way was sought to have longer block chains or blockchains that would allow more transactions to be carried out in less time. This fork arose from the disagreement between the creators of Bitcoin to increase the block size limit of the first cryptocurrency. Bitcoin Cash has been presented as a more scalable cryptocurrency, with reduced transaction fees and faster confirmation times.

Unlike Litecoin, which tries to act as a brother to Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash is the direct competitor of Bitcoin. Its uniqueness comes from its scaling solution being increased block size rather than Bitcoin's SegWit or Lightning Network. At the moment, Bitcoin Cash can process up to 61 transactions per second and a maximum of 21,000,000 coins. It is the third cryptocurrency after Bitcoin and Ethereum within the scope of market capitalization.

Features of Bitcoin Cash

Because Bitcoin Cash is a hard fork of Bitcoin without major modifications, its mining is identical to that of Bitcoin. For the mining process, the Proof of Work (PoW) consensus protocol is used together with the SHA-256 hash. This means that Bitcoin mining equipment is used to mine Bitcoin Cash with some simple modifications. This was initially striking for those who started mining Bitcoin Cash. The decrease in mining power on the network meant a drop in mining difficulty that many took advantage of to obtain quick profits.

However, in 2018 this situation changed drastically. At that time, BCH mining turned out to be very expensive in relation to the profits obtained from it. This led to the mining difficulty being readjusted again to maintain the level of miners' profits. Despite this, Bitcoin Cash mining continues to give little profit, this as a consequence of the low commissions charged by the low value of BCH with respect to Bitcoin.

What is a hard fork?

Basically, a hard fork splits a blockchain in two, with a change to the blockchain code meaning that two versions now exist.

A hard fork creates two versions of the blockchain that are not compatible with each other. This means that nodes running on the new version of the blockchain will not recognize transactions made on the old version, and vice versa. All nodes on the blockchain must agree to the change for the hard fork to occur.

One of the most vociferated features of BCH is its ability to accept 0-conf transactions. These refer to transactions that are taken as carried out without having confirmations in the blockchain. This is an option that was possible to use in Bitcoin Core, you just had to issue a transaction and accept it without confirmations.

However, this carries a significant risk of double spending. Faced with this situation, Bitcoin Core and BCH have diverged on this point and have created tools to handle this situation. In the case of Bitcoin Core, the RBF (Replace by Fee) function has been created, but Bitcoin Cash considers this an unnecessary risk. In that case, Bitcoin Cash's response has been to allow miners to maintain mempool transactions with unique identifiers that are managed by nodes and miners. This prevents, for example, a Bitcoin Cash user from sending a transaction and replacing it with another using the same coins. With this they would seek to invalidate the first and make a double expense.

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