Bitcoin Cash (BCH) is the seventh-largest cryptocurrency at the time of writing, and one of the biggest and most important forks of Bitcoin (BTC).
The coin came into existence in mid 2017, just when the famous crypto bull run was underway. At the time, developers and miners were debating potential solutions that would help Bitcoin solve its scalability issue. Bitcoin, for all its popularity, fame and valuation, has quite a few flaws. Its blockchain is very slow, and it can only handle a handful of transactions/information per block.
Developers and miners came up with two solutions – making the amount of data that needed to be verified smaller, and making the blocks of data bigger. However, not everyone agreed with this, so a part of the community split off and caused a hard fork that led to the creation of Bitcoin Cash.
BCH blocks can now handle 8 MB of data, as opposed to Bitcoin's 1 MB, and it is based on the technology known as segregated witness, or SegWit2x, which makes the amount of data that needs to be verified smaller.
As a result, BCH is a faster blockchain that can, in theory, handle more transactions, and do it faster than its ancestor Bitcoin.
BCH analysis: a story of the most successful BTC offshoot
Bitcoin Cash was officially launched on July 24, 2017, and at the time, it was believed to be a better version of Bitcoin – at least by some. It attracted enough attention for its price to start growing rather quickly.