Satoshi designed the protocol of Bitcoin in 2008, and the network went online in 2009 by mining what’s known as the genesis block, which is the foremost block on the blockchain of Bitcoin. As time passed, Bitcoin’s audience increased from a little community of cryptographers and computer scientists to be rapidly mainstream. As people continued to adopt Bitcoin, several strategies and opinions about how its growth can be accommodated came up within its core developers group.
In the early stages of Bitcoin, this network had the full capability to manage loads of transactions of a small developers community. But since it became popular, a whole lot of transactions started to bog down the network, which then slowed down their processing time. They felt that it might eventually take days or even weeks for BTC transactions to clear if they do nothing, and that’d also need users to pay more fees for the process to be accelerated. None of these scenarios were ideal, and that’s what’s known as the scalability issue of Bitcoin.
Two camps proposed some solutions: the ones that would like to increase the size of the block, and the ones that’d like to keep the size of the block small. The size of the block is the amount of data every block in a precise blockchain can house. The highest block size of Bitcoin is 1 megabyte, and that’s not much data by almost all technological standards. Of course, there were advantages and disadvantages on the two sides, but none could convince the unity of the developers’ community.
Since the top developers couldn’t agree on the right step forward, there was a hard fork in the original Bitcoin protocol in 2017. In both the soft and hard fork, developers updated the original blockchain that’s not accepted by every node. For the hard fork, all nodes that accepted the update were taken to a new blockchain, then they separated the new blockchain’s coins and made them unique from the original coins. This brought about the birth of BCH (Bitcoin Cash), complete with a distinct BCH cryptocurrency and Bitcoin Cash blockchain.
What’s the Need for Another Bitcoin? When it comes to widespread adoption, functionality, and scalability, transaction speed is important. The original Bitcoin is able to process 7 transactions each second, and BCH can averagely process 116 transactions every second. From the perspective of BCH supporters, a 7 transactions per second speed won’t cut it as time passes.
The primary aim of the Bitcoin Cash fork was for increasing the number of transactions that’d happen every second, and that’s reflected in the increased block size of BCH. Additionally, developers tried predicting the entire data volume that was required to be verified in every transaction, and that further accelerated the process.
Bitcoin Cash: How Does it Work? They settled Bitcoin Cash with the use of a large block size (that’s 4 to 8 times larger compared to BTC, and that depends on the SegWit (Segregated Witness) use, in making transactions faster.
The speed of this transaction is so fast that you could make an instant purchase with BCH at the grocery store. But if you’d like to make a huge purchase like a house or a car, you can choose more secure and slower crypto such as BTC.
Therefore, BTC and BCH play different parts. Not all cryptocurrencies are stored of value, and not all cryptocurrencies need to quickly process data to work like a credit card transaction. It’s reasonable to perform different tasks with different tools. This is just like you pay for your food in a restaurant with a credit card and purchase a house via bank transfer.
Bitcoin cash is ultimately faster and its processing fees are lower compared to BTC, but people still use it less frequently compared to the wide use of BTC. As time passes, we believe that more people will come to know BCH, and complementary technological innovations and improvements will create the path for BCH to become a top choice for crypto payments.
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