Bitcoin Cash

Bitcoin Cash is a cryptocurrency that is a fork of Bitcoin.[5][6] Bitcoin Cash is a spin-off or altcoin that was created in 2017.[7][8][5] In 2018 Bitcoin Cash subsequently split into two cryptocurrencies: Bitcoin Cash, and Bitcoin SV.[9] Bitcoin Cash is sometimes also referred to as Bcash.[10]

Bitcoin Cash
Ticker symbolBCH[1]
Precision10−8
Development
Implementation(s)Bitcoin ABC, Bitcoin Unlimited
Latest release0.19.10 / 25 July 2019 (2019-07-25)[2]
Development statusActive
Project fork ofBitcoin
Websitebitcoincash.org
Ledger
Ledger start3 January 2009 (2009-01-03)[3][4]:ch. 35
Split height#478559 / 1 August 2017 (2017-08-01)
Split fromBitcoin
Split ratio1:1
Timestamping schemeProof-of-work (partial hash inversion)
Hash functionSHA-256
Issuance scheduleInitially 50 BCH per block, halved every 210,000 blocks
Block reward6.25 BCH [lower-alpha 1]
Block time10 minutes
Block explorerblockchair.com/bitcoin-cash/blocks
Supply limit21,000,000 BCH[lower-alpha 2]
  1. as of April 2020; halved approximately every four years
  2. The supply will approach, but never reach, 21 million BCH. Issuance will permanently halt c. 2140 at 20,999,999.9769 BCH.

History

The need to accommodate an increasing count of transactions per second contributed to a push by some in the community to create a hard fork to increase the block size limit.[11] 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.[12][13] Fortune Magazine in early 2020 referred to Roger Ver as the co-creator of Bitcoin Cash.[14] Bitcoin Cash supporters, compared to Bitcoin, were more committed to a medium of exchange function.[15] 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.[12] Eventually, a group of bitcoin activists,[16] investors, entrepreneurs, developers[12] and largely China-based miners were unhappy with Bitcoin's proposed SegWit improvement plans meant to increase capacity and pushed forward alternative plans for a split which created Bitcoin Cash.[17] Segwit controversially would later enable second layer solutions on bitcoin such as the Lightning Network, and this controversy led to the split that created Bitcoin Cash.[15] 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.[12][13]

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 implementing SegWit; 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. The change, called a fork, took effect on 1 August 2017. As a result, the bitcoin ledger called the blockchain and the cryptocurrency split in two.[18]

A Hong Kong newspaper likened this to a new version of word processing software saying:

Bitcoin cash is like a new version of Microsoft Word, which generates documents that can no longer be opened via the older versions.[19]

Bryan Kelly, a stock analyst likened it to a software upgrade:

Bitcoin cash is doing a “hard fork” or “effectively a software upgrade,” Kelly said on “Fast Money.” “When you do a software upgrade, everybody usually agrees. But in this particular case, everybody is not agreeing.”[20]

At the time of the software upgrade (also known as a fork) anyone owning bitcoin came into possession of the same number of Bitcoin Cash units.[21][18] The technical difference between Bitcoin Cash and Bitcoin is that Bitcoin Cash allows larger blocks in its blockchain than Bitcoin, which in theory allows it to process more transactions per second.[22] Bitcoin Cash was the first of the Bitcoin forks, in which software-development teams modified the original Bitcoin computer code and released coins with “Bitcoin" in their names, with "the goal of creating money out of thin air."[23] In relation to Bitcoin it is characterized variously as a spin-off,[5] a strand,[24] a product of a hard fork,[25] an offshoot,[26] a clone,[17] a second version[16] or an altcoin. On 1 August 2017 Bitcoin Cash began trading at about $240, while bitcoin traded at about $2,700.[18]

A key difference of opinion between bitcoin cash and bitcoin camps was over the running of nodes. Bitcoin supporters wanted to keep blocks small so that nodes could be operated with less resources, while some bitcoin cash supporters find it acceptable that (due to large block sizes), nodes might only be run by universities, private companies and nonprofits.[27]

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 development team about it and the bug was fixed.[28]

Controversy
Controversy
“The arguments have devolved over three or four years of bitter debate, the principles are real and they are important to preserve, but a lot of the drama has nothing to do with principles anymore. A lot of this debate is now more about hurt feelings. It’s about bruised egos. It’s about things that were said that can’t be unsaid, insults that were exchanged, and personalities and ego.”

Andreas Antonopoulos, "The Verge"

In 2017 there were two factions of bitcoin supporters, those that supported large blocks and those who preferred small blocks.[22] The Bitcoin Cash faction favors the use of its currency as a medium of exchange for commerce while the Bitcoin-supporting faction view bitcoin's primary use as that of a store of value.[22] Bitcoin Cash detractors call the cryptocurrency "Bcash," "Btrash," or "a scam", while its supporters maintain that "it is the pure form of bitcoin".[22]

Samson Mow of Blockstream pointed to Bitcoin Cash's use of the "Bitcoin" name as a source of animosity between the Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash camps.[22] Emin Gün Sirer, a professor at Cornell stated that Bitcoin Cash was focused on use and Bitcoin was "enormously" focused on store of value.[22]

Trading and usage
Number of Bitcoin Cash transactions per month (logarithmic scale)[29]

Bitcoin Cash trades on digital currency exchanges including Bitstamp,[30] Coinbase,[31] Gemini,[32] Kraken,[33] Bitfinex, and ShapeShift using the Bitcoin Cash name and the BCH ticker symbol for the cryptocurrency. On 26 March 2018, OKEx removed all Bitcoin Cash trading pairs except for BCH/BTC, BCH/ETH and BCH/USDT due to "inadequate liquidity".[5] As of May 2018, daily transaction numbers for Bitcoin Cash are about one-tenth of those of bitcoin.[5] Coinbase listed Bitcoin Cash on December 19, 2017 and the coinbase platform experienced price abnormalities that led to an insider trading investigation.[34]

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.[11] On 20 December 2017 it reached an intraday high of $4,355.62 and then fell 88% to $519.12 on 23 August 2018.[35]

As of August 2018, Bitcoin Cash payments are supported by payment service providers such as BitPay, Coinify and GoCoin.[36]

Difficulty adjustment algorithm

Both Bitcoin, as well as Bitcoin Cash, use a proof-of-work algorithm to timestamp every new block. The proof of work algorithm used is the same in both cases. It can be described as a partial inversion of a hash function. Additionally, both Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash target a new block to be generated every ten minutes on average. The time needed to calculate a new block is influenced by a parameter called the mining difficulty. If the total amount of mining power increases, an increase of the mining difficulty can keep the block time roughly constant. Vice versa, if the mining power decreases, a decrease of the mining difficulty can keep the block time roughly constant.[37]

To keep the block generation time equal to ten minutes on average, both Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash use an algorithm adjusting the mining difficulty parameter. This algorithm is called the difficulty adjustment algorithm (DAA). Originally, both Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash used the same difficulty adjustment algorithm, adjusting the mining difficulty parameter every 2016 blocks. Since 1 August 2017, Bitcoin Cash also used an addition to the DAA, called an Emergency Difficulty Adjustment (EDA) algorithm. EDA was used alongside the original DAA and it was designed to decrease the mining difficulty of Bitcoin Cash by 20%, if the time difference between 6 successive blocks was greater than 12 hours.[37]

EDA adjustments caused instabilities in mining difficulty of the Bitcoin Cash system, resulting in Bitcoin Cash being thousands of blocks ahead of Bitcoin. To address the problem with stability, a change of the Bitcoin Cash DAA was implemented and the EDA canceled. The change took effect on 13 November 2017. After the change, the Bitcoin Cash DAA adjusts the mining difficulty after each block. To calculate the difficulty for a new block, the Bitcoin Cash DAA uses a moving window of last 144 blocks.[37]

A group of researchers demonstrated that, as of June 2019, Bitcoin DAA fails to generate new blocks at a constant rate as long as the hash supply is elastic. In contrast to that, the group demonstrated that Bitcoin Cash DAA is stable even when the cryptocurrency price is volatile and the supply of hash power is highly elastic.[38]

2018 split to create Bitcoin SV
Number of Bitcoin SV transactions per month (logarithmic scale)[29]

On 15 November 2018, a hard fork chain split of Bitcoin Cash occurred between two rival factions called Bitcoin Cash and Bitcoin SV.[39][40] On 15 November 2018 Bitcoin Cash traded at about $289 and Bitcoin SV traded at about $96.50, down from $425.01 on 14 November for the un-split Bitcoin Cash.[41]

The split originated from what was described as a "civil war" in two competing bitcoin cash camps.[20][42] The first camp, supported by entrepreneur Roger Ver and Jihan Wu of Bitmain, promoted the software entitled Bitcoin ABC (short for Adjustable Blocksize Cap) which would maintain the block size at 32MB.[42] The second camp led by Craig Steven Wright and billionaire Calvin Ayre put forth a competing software version Bitcoin SV, short for "Bitcoin Satoshi Vision," that would increase the block size limit to 128MB.[39][42]

See also

References
  1. Vigna, Paul (1 August 2017). "Bitcoin Rival Launches in Volatile First Day". WSJ. Retrieved 28 June 2019.
  2. "Releases - Bitcoin-ABC/bitcoin-abc". Retrieved 6 August 2019 – via GitHub.
  3. Cuthbertson, Anthony (21 May 2018). "The Battle over Bitcoin: Scandal and Infighting as 'Bitcoin Cash' Threatens to Overthrow the Most Famous Cryptocurrency". Independent. Retrieved 23 July 2018.
  4. Mukhi, Vijay; Khanapurkar, Nitin (2017). The Undocumented Internals of the Bitcoin, Ethereum and Blockchains. BPB Publications. ISBN 978-9-3865-5130-6.
  5. Kelly, Jemima (15 May 2018). "Bitcoin cash is expanding into the void". Financial Times. Retrieved 3 June 2018.
  6. Smith, Oli (21 January 2018). "Bitcoin price RIVAL: Cryptocurrency 'faster than bitcoin' will CHALLENGE market leaders". Express. Retrieved 1 March 2018.
  7. Vigna, Paul (23 December 2017). "Bitcoin Cash, Litecoin, Ether, Oh My! What's With All the Bitcoin Clones?". WSJ. Retrieved 6 June 2018.
  8. Wilson, Tom (17 July 2019). "Smaller cryptocurrencies feel pain as criticism of Facebook's Libra grows". Reuters. Retrieved 23 July 2019.
  9. Kharif, Olga (23 November 2018). "Bitcoin Cash Wars End With No Relief for Biggest Cryptocurrency". Bloomberg LP. Retrieved 18 August 2019.
  10. Bcash Nickname Sources:
  11. Laura Shin (23 October 2017). "Will This Battle For The Soul Of Bitcoin Destroy It?". Forbes. Retrieved 14 April 2018.
  12. Popper, Nathaniel (25 July 2017). "Some Bitcoin Backers Are Defecting to Create a Rival Currency". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved 28 July 2017.
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  14. Morris, David (8 January 2020). "In Cryptocurrency, It's Bitcoiners vs. Everyone Else". Fortune.com. Retrieved 2 February 2020.
  15. "SegWit and the bitcoin transaction fee conspiracy theory". FT Alphaville. FT. 21 March 2018.
  16. "Bitcoin divides to rule". The Economist. 5 August 2017. Retrieved 23 July 2018.
  17. Irrera, Anna; Chavez-Dreyfuss, Gertrude (2 August 2017). "Bitcoin 'clone' sees a slow start following split". Independent. Retrieved 22 June 2018.
  18. Selena Larson (1 August 2017). "Bitcoin split in two, here's what that means". CNN Tech. Cable News Network. Retrieved 2 April 2018.
  19. Huang, Zheping (15 November 2018). "Bitcoin cash "hard fork": everything you need to know about the latest cryptocurrency civil war". South China Morning Post. Retrieved 3 August 2019.
  20. Clifford, Tyler (14 November 2018). "'Crypto civil war' slams bitcoin, but it won't last, says BKCM's Brian Kelly". CNBC. Retrieved 18 November 2018.
  21. Kharif, Olga (15 January 2019). "Ethereum Seeks to Prove a Crypto Fork Need Not Be Contentious". CNBC. Retrieved 3 August 2019.
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  25. Orcutt, Mike (14 November 2017). "Bitcoin Cash Had a Big Day, Hinting at a Deep Conflict in the Cryptocurrency Community". MIT Technology Review. Retrieved 7 June 2018.
  26. Chen, Lulu Yilun; Lam, Eric. "Bitcoin Is Likely to Split Again in November, Say Major Players". Bloomberg. Retrieved 22 January 2018.
  27. Cuen, Leigh (22 August 2017). "Why Some People Love Bitcoin Cash". International Business Times. Retrieved 2 November 2019.
  28. Evans, John (10 August 2018). "Cryptocurrency insecurity: IOTA, BCash and too many more". Techcrunch. Retrieved 12 August 2018.
  29. "Blockchair". Blockchair.com. Retrieved 13 October 2019.
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  38. Noda, Shunya; Okumura, Kyohei; Hashimoto, Yoshinori (26 June 2019). "A Lucas Critique to the Difficulty Adjustment Algorithm of the Bitcoin System". SSRN. doi:10.2139/ssrn.3410460. SSRN 3410460.
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  40. Kharif, Olga (23 November 2018). "Bitcoin Cash Wars End With No Relief for Biggest Cryptocurrency". Bloomberg. Retrieved 7 December 2018.
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