Bitcoin Cash(BCH)

Although Bitcoin is widely perceived as the gold standard of the crypto industry, it has been criticized for technical shortcomings as the space has continued to grow. One of its major challenges has been its scalability, mostly given its hard-coded 1 MB block size. This means as the Bitcoin network grows, it also becomes a lot more congested and consequently expensive to transact on.

The discussion around this problem began as early as in 2010, as one of the solutions proposed was to increase Bitcoin's block size but there were those who did not support such a change. Tensions, however, peaked in mid-2017 when proponents of bigger blocks, hard forked Bitcoin to create Bitcoin Cash (BCH), with an 8 MB block limit. This was later increased to 32 MB in 2018.

Bitcoin Cash’s main aim is to realize Bitcoin’s original purpose of serving as a cheap ‘peer-to-peer electronic cash system’. It is supposedly dedicated toward this objective, and is open to increasing block sizes and transaction throughputs, whenever necessary and feasible. Unlike Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash focuses more on becoming a medium of value exchange, rather than being optimized for secure value storage. BCH, the native coin of Bitcoin Cash works just like BTC, meaning it is p2p and can be paid by one person to another, without any censorship or intermediary.

BCH price

According to our BCH live price chart, BCH coin traded within the range of $200 to $700 from the time of its launch in July 2017 till November that year, when boosted by a bullish market, it registered noteworthy gains and peaked at an all-time high of $3,785 on Dec 20, 2017. BCH’s fully diluted valuation was over $79 billion at that point. A corrective phase followed and BCH price retraced to around $640 by April 10, 2018. It rose briefly a month later to breach $1,000, but gave into bearish pressure and continued falling — ending 2018 at $160.

While BCH coin regained some of its lost ground thereafter, it couldn’t break out of $500 resistance, for over 2 years. Its next big surge started around January 2021, when buoyed up by improved market conditions, it rallied on to reach $1,650 on May 12, 2021. However, a bearish phase followed again, returning the BCH price to under $500 territory by year-end. In 2022, BCH coin tested even lower support levels and fell further to under $200 by Q2, 2022.

How BCH works

Bitcoin Cash works a lot like Bitcoin. Both the blockchain networks have a maximum supply of 21 million coins and employ Proof of Work (PoW) consensus mechanism for the verification and processing of transactions. Network participants called ‘miners’ use special computing equipment to compete against each other, to discover and add new blocks to the Bitcoin Cash blockchain. These miners use the SHA-256 hashing algorithm, same as the one used in Bitcoin.  

One of the biggest differences between Bitcoin Cash and Bitcoin is how the difficulty level is adjusted for mining new blocks. While in Bitcoin's case, this adjustment is made after every 2016 mined blocks, Bitcoin Cash adjusts its difficulty level every 10 minutes, to provide a more updated insight into its computing power requirement. 

BCH holders can send and receive coins with the help of a unique public key associated with their respective digital wallets. As its average transfer fee is as low as $0.01, with almost-instant settlements, BCH is actively used for micro-transactions, peer-to-peer payments, everyday transactions, international remittances and cross-border trade payments. The coin is also commonly used as a value storage medium.

BCH news, updates and highlights

The year 2020 saw multiple positive developments for BCH, including the launch of the Tether (USDT) stablecoin on the Bitcoin Cash network in March 2020. The largest stablecoin in the world by market cap, USDT, was implemented on the Bitcoin Cash chain, using the SLP (Simple Ledger Protocol) token standard. SLP standard is to Bitcoin Cash what ERC-20 is to Ethereum. As a result, people could now transact USDT coins on the Bitcoin Cash blockchain, apart from other popular networks like Tron, Ethereum, Omni, Liquid Network, EOS and Algorand.

In more recent BCH news, the Bitcoin Cash network underwent a major upgrade on May 15, 2021, resulting in a variety of changes to the blockchain, including enabling of multiple OP_RETURNS, removal of unconfirmed transaction limit, making new mining block default limit size as 8 MB, inclusion on Cash Improvement Proposals (CHIPs) and implementation of double-spend proofs.

Frequently asked questions about BCH

• Can you mine or stake Bitcoin Cash?
  As Bitcoin Cash uses a Proof of Work consensus algorithm, you can participate in its mining network and mine new BCH coins.

• What are some of the best BCH wallets?
  Bitcoin Cash's official website recommends various crypto wallets for BCH storage, including BitPay, Melis Wallet, Pokket, Trezor and Ledger.
  

• What can you do with Bitcoin Cash?
  You can use BCH as a value storage medium or for making peer-to-peer payments to others. Many people also trade it against other cryptocurrencies on established exchanges.

• How can you buy BCH?
  The best way to buy BCH is through trading pairs like BCH/USDT, BCH/BTC, BCH/XRP, etc on well-known cryptocurrency exchanges.