Bitcoin vs Bitcoin Cash
BTC and BCH compared: live market data, one-year performance, and the key differences.
| Metric |  Bitcoin |  Bitcoin Cash |
|---|---|---|
| Price | $83,866 | $339.74 |
| Market Cap | $1.68T | $6.83B |
| 24h Volume | $36.11B | $372.54M |
| Rank | #1 | #21 |
| Circulating Supply | 20.09M | 20.09M |
| Max Supply | 21.00M | 21.00M |
| All-Time High | $126,080 (Oct 6) | $3,785.82 (Dec 19) |
| Launched | 2009-01-03 | N/A |
1-Year Relative Performance
Key Differences
Key differences
Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash share a common origin: BCH split from Bitcoin via a hard fork on August 1, 2017, in a dispute over how the network should scale. Bitcoin kept its small base-layer blocks and adopted Segregated Witness (SegWit) as a soft-fork upgrade, favoring conservative on-chain changes. Bitcoin Cash rejected SegWit and raised the block size limit from 1MB to 8MB at the fork, allowing miners to process several times more payments per second on-chain, with subsequent upgrades delivered mainly through hard forks.
Their consensus and supply mechanics remain nearly identical. Both use Proof of Work with the SHA-256 algorithm, both cap supply at 21 million coins, and both have roughly 20 million coins already mined with halving schedules. Because they share a mining algorithm, the same hardware can mine either chain, though Bitcoin commands the overwhelming majority of hash power.
Their ecosystem positions have diverged substantially. Bitcoin is the largest cryptocurrency by market rank, widely treated as "digital gold" — a store of value and settlement asset — with scaling activity pushed to layers above the base chain. Bitcoin Cash, ranked far lower, positions itself as peer-to-peer electronic cash for everyday payments, emphasizing cheap on-chain transactions over layered scaling.
Same monetary design, same mining algorithm — but opposite answers to the question of whether scaling should happen on the base layer or on top of it.