What is Bitcoin Cash | Beginners' Guide

Curious about Bitcoin Cash? Want to know why and how it was developed? Here’s a quick beginner’s guide for you.

Before we jump into Bitcoin Cash, you first need to understand what Bitcoin is.

Bitcoin is a decentralized peer-to-peer e-cash system. All transactions are recorded publicly on a ledger called the blockchain and verified through a process called mining. Initially developed as an idea by a mysterious man named Satoshi Nakamoto in 2008, the white paper he wrote eventually turned into Bitcoin.

What’s so special about Bitcon anyway?

No one owns or controls Bitcoin.

Bitcoin is not governed by a particular body and no one person holds all the power. Transactions once made cannot be reversed.

There are only 21 million Bitcoins in the world

All fiat currencies are plagued by inflation because there is no cap. Bitcoin, on the other hand, has a fixed supply.

Transactions on the blockchain are cheap and fast

Gone are the days of paying card providers high transaction fees. Bitcoin allows you to make reliable and affordable transactions.

Accessible to everyone

Since Bitcoin is an open source project, anyone can review and change the code.

Bitcoin over the years

10 years since Bitcoin was developed, it has become a worldwide phenomenon. This is in part because of the growing distrust in fiat currencies and in part because of widespread awareness. Facebook’s Libra has also played a role in bringing it back to the limelight.

However, some glaring problems have become apparent. The size of the blockchain was limited to 1 MB which began to result in slower, less reliable transactions, much higher fees. You see, Bitcoin was not built to scale up and this created a major rift in the Bitcoin community. A small group of developers from the Blockstream Company wanted to keep the 1 MB block sizes and work on off-chain settlement layers and began to remove users who thought differently.

The Hard Fork Aug 2017: Bitcoin Cash is born

Developers of Bitcoin-ABC initiated a hard fork of the Bitcoin blockchain to increase the block size. Bitcoin Cash was born and had 8 MB blocks.

This helped make Bitcoin usable again. Transaction fees dropped and transaction times became faster.

Future of Bitcoin Cash

The idea to use Bitcoin as digital cash is still alive thanks to Bitcoin Cash. There are multiple teams of independent developers that provide software implementations. This helps keep Bitcoin Cash decentralized. The block size has been upgraded to 32MB blocks. Bitcoin Cash has a very clear roadmap ahead.

How to exchange BTC to BCH

If you want to perform a Bitcoin to Bitcoin Cash exchange or a Bitcoin Cash to Bitcoin exchange, you will need CoinSwitch.

You will find the best exchange rates for BTC to BCH and BCH to BTC on CoinSwitch and minimal trading and withdrawal fees. You can even perform the exchange without signing up for an account. All you need is a Bitcoin or Bitcoin Cash wallet address.

Lena Burkut is an passionate writer. She loves to share business tips and her experience about industry.