History
Rising fees on the bitcoin network contributed to a push by some in the community to create a hard fork to increase the blocksize. [14] This push came to a head in July 2017 when some members of the Bitcoin community including Roger Ver felt that adopting BIP 91 without increasing the block-size limit favored people who wanted to treat Bitcoin as a digital investment rather than as a transactional currency. [ 15] [16] This push by some to increase the block size met a resistance. Since its inception up to July 2017, bitcoin users had maintained a common set of rules for the cryptocurrency. [15] [12] investors, entrepreneurs, developers [15] and largely China based miners were unhappy with bitcoin's proposed SegWitimprovement plans intended to increase capacity and pushed forward alternative plans for a split that created Bitcoin Cash. [11] ] The proposed split included a plan to increase the number of transactions its ledger can process by increasing the block size limit to eight megabytes. [15] [16]
The would-be hard fork with an expanded block size limit was described by hardware manufacturer Bitmain in June 2017 as a "contingency plan" should the Bitcoin community decide to fork; the first implementation of the software was proposed under the name Bitcoin ABC at a conference that month. In July 2017, the Bitcoin Cash Name was proposed by mining pool ViaBTC.
In 2018 Bitcoin Core developer Cory Fields found a bug in the Bitcoin ABC software that would have allowed an attacker to create a block causing a chain split. Fields notified the #DevelopmentTeam about it and the bug was fixed. [17]
The research firm Chainanalysis noted that in May 2018, 17 largest payment processing services such as BitPay, Coinify, and GoCoin processed Bitcoin Cash payments worth of US $ 3.7 million, down from US $ 10.5 million processed in March. [18]
Bitcoin Cash is also referred to as Bcash. [19]
Trading
Bitcoin Cash trades on digital currency exchanges including Bitstamp, [20] Coinbase, [21] Gemini, [22] Kraken, [23] and ShapeShift using the Bitcoin Cash name and the BCH ticker symbol for the cryptocurrency. A few other exchanges use the BCC ticker symbol, although BCC is commonly used for Bitconnect. On 26 March 2018, OKExremoved all Bitcoin Cash trading pairs except for BCH / BTC, BCH / ETH and BCH / USDT due to "adequate liquidity. "[6] As of May 2018, daily transaction numbers for Bitcoin Cash are about one-tenth of those of bitcoin. [6]
By November 2017 the value of Bitcoin Cash, which had been as high as $ 900, had fallen to around $ 300, much of that due to people who had originally held Bitcoin selling off the Bitcoin Cash they received at the hard fork. [14] On December 20, 2017 it reached an intraday high of $ 4,355.62 and then fell 88% to $ 519.12 on August 23, 2018. [24]
Payment service providers
As of August 2018, Bitcoin Cash payments are supported by payment service providers such as BitPay, Coinify and GoCoin. [18]