Bitcoin Cash/BCH

Many are rather unaware of the provenance of Bitcoin Cash and how it actually came about. Bitcoin Cash (BCH) is an upgraded version of the Bitcoin Core software. It was released on August 1st, 2017 and caused considerable controversy at the time but has widely grown to be an acceptable and very versatile alternative to Bitcoin. The main upgrade offered by Bitcoin Cash is an increase of the blocksize limit to 8mb. This effectively allows miners on the BCH chain to process more payments per second. This makes for faster, cheaper transactions and a much smoother user experience.

Bitcoin Cash was created to bring back the essential qualities of money inherent in the original Bitcoin software. Over the years, these qualities were filtered out of Bitcoin Core and progress was stifled by various people, organizations, and companies involved in Bitcoin protocol development. The result is that Bitcoin Core is currently unusable as money due to increasingly high fees per transactions and transfer times taking hours to days. This is all because of the problems created by Bitcoin Core's blocks being full. The value of the currency shot up almost immediately to almost unheard of levels upon the launch from around $8 to over $2,000 in a matter of days before settling at around $1500 then shooting up again to the $3,000-3,500 mark in early December. It has since crashed badly and is now trading at barely above $1100.

Bitcoin Cash is also a much cheaper crypto currency to use than Bitcoin. Because transaction fees in both versions of Bitcoin are measured in satoshis-per-byte (a unit of Bitcoin is divisible to 8 decimal places and the smallest unit is called a "satoshi") the way you have to accurately measure Bitcoin fees is not in dollars, but in satoshis.

Due to the fact that Bitcoin Core blocks are always full and there's a large line up of people, currently, the bouncer is charging more than 900 satoshis per byte for inclusion into a block. At the time of writing, it costs more than $30 to make a single Bitcoin transaction.

By comparison, Bitcoin Cash's average fee is 19 satoshis per byte. With Bitcoin Cash, you can also set your fees manually as low as 2 satoshis per byte and be included into the next block, because there is plenty of room for everyone who wants to send a transaction.

It is also important to note that Bitcoin Cash is actually Bitcoin and not a separate currency as some seem to imply. It's important to note that Bitcoin Cash is neither an altcoin nor a knock-off of Bitcoin Core. Bitcoin Cash is a hard fork of Bitcoin Core, meaning it shares the same transaction ledger and history of Bitcoin Core, and is true to the Bitcoin Core codebase until it diverged on August 1st, 2017.

The reality is that Bitcoin Cash is Bitcoin as it was meant to be-an electronic peer-to-peer cash system. This does not mean that BCH is BTC. Obviously, these two versions of Bitcoin are different networks, have different ticker symbols, and trade at different prices. But Bitcoin Cash, to a much greater degree, functions as Bitcoin, the digital cash system people all over the world believed in and invested in during the initial years of adoption that lead to the worldwide phenomenon of Bitcoin as it is known today. This spirit unequivocally lives on in Bitcoin Cash and is entirely absent from Bitcoin Core and its claim as a "store of value."