Bitcoin Cash

Bitcoin Cash (BCH) is a peer-to-peer digital currency that emerged from a hard fork of Bitcoin on 1 August 2017. It was created by a part of the Bitcoin community that wanted to scale the network by increasing the block size on-chain, rather than through second-layer solutions. The goal was to keep transaction fees low and confirmations fast so the coin could function as everyday electronic cash.

The fork raised Bitcoin's 1 MB block size limit to 8 MB, and later upgrades increased the limit further. Larger blocks allow more transactions to be processed per block, which supporters argue preserves the original vision of Bitcoin as a payment system. Because Bitcoin Cash shares Bitcoin's history up to the fork, anyone who held BTC at the time of the split received an equal amount of BCH.

How Bitcoin Cash works

Bitcoin Cash uses the same Proof of Work consensus model as Bitcoin, secured by SHA-256 mining. Miners compete to add blocks roughly every ten minutes and receive newly issued BCH plus transaction fees as a reward. The monetary policy also mirrors Bitcoin's: a hard cap of 21 million coins, with block rewards halving on a set schedule, and around 20 million BCH already in circulation.

Within the wider crypto ecosystem, Bitcoin Cash is one of the most prominent Bitcoin forks and is positioned primarily as a payments-focused currency. It is widely listed on exchanges and supported by many wallets and payment processors. Development continues through independent node implementations, and periodic protocol upgrades have added features while keeping the core economic rules of the original Bitcoin design intact.