Bitcoin, despite being the first and most widely-adopted cryptocurrency in the world, has serious limitations regarding speed, transaction fee, and scalability. People have come up with many creative ways to remedy the disadvantages of Bitcoin, one of which is changing the rules of the Bitcoin blockchain to allow for better processing speed.
Bitcoin Cash was created based on that idea in 2017. Originally, the proposal to increase Bitcoin's block size to improve on the network's performance was put forward. However, the majority of nodes voted against that change, so a hard fork was born as a result and Bitcoin Cash came to be as a separate ledger from Bitcoin at block number 478,558 on August 1, 2017 - two chains, same origin.
Since Bitcoin Cash is a hard fork of Bitcoin, when it was born, Bitcoin holders received the same amount of Bitcoin Cash to their wallets. Though Bitcoin Cash aims to replace the dominance of Bitcoin completely, it fails miserably, largely due to the transaction speed and low fee that it boasts. Nonetheless, since its inception, Bitcoin Cash has maintained its position as one of the most popular cryptocurrencies.
Bitcoin Cash, being Bitcoin's hard fork, technically works in the same way as its predecessor. It is a public decentralized digital ledger that implements the Proof-of-Work consensus mechanism, uses nodes to validate transactions, and has a total supply of 21 million tokens. Miners of Bitcoin Cash also receive the native tokens as reward for solving cryptographic questions and adding transactions to the blockchain. BCH, the token of Bitcoin Cash, is listed on many exchanges and can be freely traded just like Bitcoin.
On the other hand, while Bitcoin has 1MB in each block and can only process about seven transactions per second, Bitcoin Cash boasts 32MB per block and enables more than a hundred transactions to go through in one second. Bigger block size and faster transaction speed leads to another advantage of Bitcoin Cash, that is lower fee. In fact, a transaction on Bitcoin Cash mostly takes less than a penny in fee, drastically contrasting the sky-high USD 60 fee of the Bitcoin network.
Faster and cheaper are synonymous to better accessibility in the world of crypto.
Despite the aforementioned advantages, Bitcoin Cash does have its own shortcomings. The main one is the doubt against the security of the network. Critics of Bitcoin Cash say that the reason why it takes less time and fee for transactions to complete on Bitcoin Cash is because the network requires less mining, and thus it is considered less secure than Bitcoin.
How Many BCH Tokens Are There In Circulation/Supply?
Other than the bigger block size, Bitcoin Cash BCH shares the same properties and characters with Bitcoin. BCH has a total supply of 21 million tokens, is used to reward miners for their computing power, and has its periodical halving events.
Total Supply: 21,000,000 BCH
Max Supply: 21,000,000 BCH
Circulating Supply: 19,177,812.50 BCH
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