Bitcoin Cash (BCH) is a cryptocurrency created on 1 August 2017, when a group of miners, developers and businesses broke away from Bitcoin to run a version with much larger blocks. Its supporters wanted Bitcoin to work as everyday electronic cash, with low fees and quick payments, rather than mainly as something to hold. Anyone who owned Bitcoin at the moment of the split received the same number of BCH, and the two coins have traded separately ever since.
This entry covers the coin. Bitcoin Cash shares the full history of Bitcoin (BTC) up to block 478,558 and keeps most of the design of the Bitcoin Blockchain. It is the best-known product of a hard fork, and it later split itself: in November 2018 a rival faction left to form Bitcoin SV (BSV). A separate fork of Bitcoin in October 2017 produced Bitcoin Gold (BTG).
Bitcoin Cash in plain terms
Picture a club that keeps its shared accounts in a notebook with a fixed number of lines per page. As more members joined, the pages filled up, and people who wanted their payment written down quickly began offering bigger tips to the bookkeepers. One group said the answer was to keep the pages as they were and settle small payments somewhere else. Another group said the answer was simple: use bigger pages.
The two groups could not agree, so the second group photocopied the whole notebook up to that day and carried on with larger pages of its own. Everyone who had coins in the old notebook found the same coins in the new one. From then on the two notebooks grew separately, and a coin spent in one did not move in the other.
Origins in the block size debate
Bitcoin Cash grew out of a dispute that ran from about 2015 to 2017 over whether Bitcoin should raise its 1 MB block size limit. As Bitcoin moved to adopt Segregated Witness (SegWit), a change that frees space inside blocks without raising the base limit, the big-block camp launched its own chain with an 8 MB limit and no SegWit. The mining pool ViaBTC mined one of the first blocks, and the investor Roger Ver became the coin's best-known promoter. The limit was raised again, to 32 MB, in May 2018.
The community kept arguing. In November 2018 a clash between two node programs, Bitcoin ABC and Bitcoin SV, split the chain; the ABC side kept the BCH ticker on most exchanges. In November 2020 a dispute over a plan to divert part of each miner reward to developers led the Bitcoin ABC team to leave and form a separate chain now known as eCash, while BCH continued on other software. The CashTokens upgrade of 15 May 2023 added native tokens and wider support for smart contracts.
Supply, mining and fees
Bitcoin Cash copies Bitcoin's monetary rules: a cap of just under 21 million coins, a block roughly every ten minutes, and new coins paid to miners under proof of work. Because both coins use the same SHA-256 mining machines, miners can switch between them, so BCH adjusts its difficulty after every block rather than every two weeks to keep block times steady when miners come and go. The reward per block follows the same halving rule as Bitcoin:
- is the block reward paid to the miner, in BCH.
- is the block height, the number of the block in the chain.
- means rounding down to a whole number, which counts the halvings so far.
At block 840,000, reached on 4 April 2024, the count of halvings is , so the reward fell to BCH. With about 144 blocks a day, that adds roughly 450 new BCH a day. The previous halving, from 12.5 to 6.25 BCH, came in April 2020. Because blocks are rarely full, a transaction fee on BCH is usually a small fraction of a US cent.
Uses
- Payments. Low fees make BCH practical for micro payments, tipping and point-of-sale purchases at merchants that accept it.
- Transfers. Some users send BCH across borders as a cheaper alternative to traditional remittances, converting to local currency at the other end.
- Tokens. Since CashTokens, projects can issue their own tokens and collectibles directly on the BCH chain.
- Trading. BCH is listed on most large centralized exchanges, and it was one of four coins offered when the US exchange EDX Markets opened in 2023.
Criticism and risks
Bitcoin Cash attracts only a small share of the SHA-256 mining power that secures Bitcoin, which in principle leaves it more exposed to a 51% attack by anyone able to redirect enough mining machines for a short time. Critics of the big-block approach argue that ever-larger blocks raise the cost of running a full node and so push the network towards fewer, larger operators. The repeated splits of 2018 and 2020 divided developers, exchanges and users, and everyday merchant adoption has stayed far below what early supporters expected. Marketing BCH under the "Bitcoin" name also drew complaints that newcomers could buy it by mistake. Like other coins, it is volatile, its price can swing sharply within days, and payments cannot be reversed once confirmed.