$314.97

Bitcoin Cash (BCH) is a decentralized digital currency designed for fast, low-cost payments, aiming to serve as global electronic cash. It operates without intermediaries, offering features like privacy and larger block sizes. BCH originated from a hard fork of Bitcoin in 2017, driven by disagreements over scalability and the SegWit upgrade. The community was divided between those favoring smaller blocks for decentralization and those advocating larger blocks for faster transactions. In 2018, another fork split BCH into Bitcoin ABC and Bitcoin SV, further diversifying the ecosystem.

Bitcoin Cash was created through a hard fork of Bitcoin, which was originally developed by the pseudonymous Satoshi Nakamoto. The fork occurred on August 1, 2017, initiated by a group of developers and miners, including Bitmain, who proposed increasing the block size to handle more transactions. This proposal was a response to network congestion and rising fees. The split received backing from notable figures like Roger Ver. Since then, BCH has undergone further forks, such as the one in November 2018 that led to the creation of Bitcoin SV, due to internal disagreements.

Bitcoin Cash operates on a blockchain with a larger block size compared to Bitcoin, enabling faster transactions and lower fees. It has a fixed supply of 21 million coins, ensuring scarcity. BCH supports smart contracts and various applications, and can be used for peer-to-peer payments, merchant transactions, micro-tipping, and cross-border remittances. Additionally, it offers privacy features through tools like CashShuffle and CashFusion, and facilitates token creation and simplified smart contracts.

Bitcoin Cash was created as a fork of Bitcoin, with all BTC holders at the time receiving an equal amount of BCH. Both share technical similarities, including a 21 million coin cap and a Proof-of-Work consensus mechanism. However, BCH aims to scale for global payments by increasing block size from 1MB to 8MB at the fork, and later to 32MB as of 2023. This allows BCH to process more transactions per second and keep fees minimal, addressing Bitcoin's scalability issues.

The total supply of Bitcoin Cash is capped at 21 million coins, similar to Bitcoin. As of May 2023, the circulating supply is approximately 19,387,119 BCH.

Bitcoin Cash uses a Proof-of-Work (PoW) consensus mechanism, where miners compete to solve complex mathematical problems to validate transactions and add new blocks to the blockchain. This process secures the network against attacks and ensures the integrity of the transaction history.

Mining Bitcoin Cash involves using computational power to solve puzzles, confirming transactions, and adding new blocks. Miners or mining pools earn block rewards in BCH for their efforts. The mining process is highly competitive, with more miners joining as the price rises, which increases the network's hash rate and security. This distributed nature prevents any single miner from gaining control.

Bitcoin Cash can be purchased on major cryptocurrency exchanges such as Binance, Coinbase, KuCoin, and Kraken. Coinasity shows the live BCH price, averaged across major exchanges.