Where did Bitcoin Cash come from?

Bitcoin Cash came from a desire to improve Bitcoin as a medium of exchange, rather than an investment medium. Following the Bitcoin community’s lack of consensus surrounding Bitcoin’s scalability, the blockchain split, resulting in the creation of Bitcoin Cash.

2017 spiked interest and resulted in the Bitcoin network becoming congested as adoption increased. This led to a backlog of transactions and increasing transaction fees, which wasn’t conducive to Bitcoin being used for everyday transactions.

That’s when the scaling debate really took off.

Bitcoin’s scaling debate

A portion of the community wanted to maintain Bitcoin’s current 1MB block sizes and saw Segwit (Segregated Witness), as a long term solution. The other part of the community made up of primarily Bitcoin miners and advocates like Roger Ver, wanted to increase the block size to 8MB, so that it would allow more transactions to be processed per block.

The two groups couldn’t reach a consensus and decided to part ways with a hard fork.

The Bitcoin Cash hard fork

On 1 August 2017, the hard fork created a completely new and separate cryptocurrency: Bitcoin Cash.

From this moment onwards, Bitcoin Cash transactions were (and are) recorded on their own separate blockchain. The fork initially increased the block size from 1MB to 8MB and later, in May 2018, another major update took place and the block size was further increased to 32MB.

Since then, the Bitcoin Cash community continues to develop its technology beyond simply offering a ‘bigger-blocks’ alternative to Bitcoin (BTC). Their focus is on facilitating everyday transactions, making them cheaper and faster so that it can be used as digital cash for everyday purposes.