What is the Difference Between Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash?
Would you like to know what is the difference between Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash because this might be confusing for some of you and you will then be able to clearly see what differentiates them?
What is the Difference Between Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash?
Bitcoin is the pioneer cryptocurrency and even though Bitcoin has gone mainstream only since the last couple of years, it has been around since 2009.
Over the last 18 months, Bitcoin has been forked in order to create more efficient variants. For those of you who aren’t aware of the meaning of hard fork, it is a division of a cryptocurrency that is split into two.
One of the variants uses the old code whereas the new cryptocurrency uses the modified code. One cryptocurrency which has been created by the hard fork of Bitcoin is Bitcoin Cash.
Many people do not actually know the difference between Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash and we will today help you better understand the difference between both.
History
Bitcoin (BTC) was invented by a person named Mr. Satoshi Nakamoto. In the year 2008, he published a paper titled "Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System."
This paper discussed the basics concepts of Bitcoin.
In the year 2009, the software for mining Bitcoin was made available publicly. During the initial years, Bitcoin was not publicly traded and it was just mined. That is why there was no particular value assigned to it.
It was only in the year 2011 that the rival cryptocurrencies started emerging.
With the emergence of Bitcoin as the most dominant cryptocurrency, problems started to show up in the network.
It was clear that the Bitcoin network was not able to handle a significant number of transactions each and every second. This is what led to the hard fork which created Bitcoin Cash (BCH).
Bitcoin Cash is technologically more advanced as compared to Bitcoin.
As a result, the Bitcoin Cash network was able to handle more transactions.
We will look into the technical aspects of both of these cryptocurrencies below.
Technology
On the blockchain, the blocks are verified in order to conclude transactions. The blocks consist of information about transactions as well as security information.
Only once all of this information is verified, transactions are authenticated and the BTC actually changes hands. The block size is actually constant and has been decided by the developers of the cryptocurrency.
The block size of BTC is 1 MB.
As the number of transactions increased exponentially, it became clear that the size limitation of each block was what was limiting BTC from achieving proper scalability.
Due to the block size limitation, it was only able to handle 7 transactions per second.
Just to provide you with a clear perspective, Visa handles 1,700 transactions each and every second. Thus, it was failing at its sole objective of becoming an actual currency. This is what prompted the developers to launch a hard fork to create Bitcoin Cash.
The hard fork which led to the creation of Bitcoin Cash was executed on August 1, 2017.
Bitcoin Cash aka BCH has a block size of 8 MB.
As a result, the number of transactions, which could be processed went up exponentially.
Moreover, the mining difficulty level can be easily adjusted in order to ensure that even when the cryptocurrency miners are on the lower side on the blockchain, the transactions can easily go through.
This also ensures that the growth in the number of miners on the blockchain will not have any kind of impact on the transaction verifications speed.
As a result, the transactions in BCH can be verified quite quickly, which ensures that the cryptocurrency can be sent and received much sooner as compared to BTC.
After the hard fork, which created BCH, the block size of Bitcoin was also increased to 2 MB.
However, even that is significantly lower as compared to the block size of BCH.
Future
During the initial days, BCH went from $300 all the way up to $3,500.
Ever since then, however, BTC has been consistently falling.
As a result, most of the other cryptocurrencies are consistently falling as well.
BCH has fallen from $3,500 to around $600 where it is currently trading.
Bitcoin has also fallen from $20,000 to $6,300 where it is currently trading.
It is almost a year since the creation of BCH and while it has got some traction as compared to the other Altcoins, it is nowhere near BTC when it comes to adoption.
The faster transaction processing speed is not currently helping much in the actual adoption of BCH. It remains to be seen whether in the future, it will be able to gain more users.
One positive thing is that quite a few merchants are starting to accept BTC as well as BCH.
However, the mass scale adoption, which most of the developers of BCH were expecting is still not around the corner. This is the reason it has not appreciated in value on the net basis either.
Currently, it is trading at a price of 1/9th to that of BTC and it has not been able to come near BTC in terms of value.
BTC, on the other hand, has protected its dominance from not just BCH, but many other cryptocurrencies.
This is why the adoption of BTC is increasing by leaps and bounds.
With the BTC ATMs as well as debit cards that have already been launched, the future looks bright for BTC.
With the increasing number of transactions in BCH as well as more vendors accepting BCH, it is not a lost cause either.
However, it is far from threatening the dominance of BTC like the developers had predicted. It might be a good cryptocurrency to invest in, but it probably will play second fiddle to Bitcoin.
Thus, when you are looking at the difference between Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash, it is important to not just look at the history, but also the technical difference between both.
Only once you are able to take all of the above factors into account, you will be able to understand the difference between both of them. Even though they might share a similar name, technologically they are quite different.
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BCH and BTC can both succeed together. I'm hoping for success in the future.
@feelsomoon, thank you very much for your comment.
i read a post by jcornel that said that BCH is actually a scam. Because it has only benefited whales since it has launched
Thank you @ssgdude for your feedback. I would look at the technology of BCH to make an opinion about it.
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@nvest Pretty good.
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Thank you very much @nicnas.