Bitcoin Cash Overview

Founded: 2017

Key persons: Roger Ver

Capitalization: $11,128,441,823

Trading volume (24h): $1,188,759,666

CoinMarketCap rank: 19

Bitcoin Cash (BCH) general project description

Bitcoin Cash (BCH) is a software solution associated with a Bitcoin blockchain fork. The fork occurs when a community changes the blockchain’s protocol, or sets of rules. During this process, the chain splits — resulting in a second blockchain that shares all of its history with the original, but heads off in a new direction. Decentralized development involves a number of coding and mining expertise hubs. Due to that fact, sometimes a consensus on a product development strategy can be hard to achieve. After the original Bitcoin blockchain was launched in 2009, an enthusiastic group of engineers took up the development, updating the protocol. Block miners have voted on all upcoming major updates that were discussed in the “bitcointalk” forum. An important discussion in 2017 (relating to the increase in block size to 8 megabytes) led to widely divergent opinions about Bitcoin development strategy, resulting in several working versions of the code, each gaining its share of support among developers and miners. A version of the blockchain supporting enlarged blocks directly was called Bitcoin Cash.

Current state (ecosystem and partners)

In many ways, both versions of the blockchain have the same functionality. Analyzing the public code repository, we can conclude that the project continues to develop, and that repositories are regularly updated. The core difference is that Bitcoin Cash has already implemented transaction validation, using a special cryptographic module called Schnorr signatures.

Future plans and development (roadmap)

The current version of the code is fairly stable, allowing developers to focus their efforts on Cashscript’s smart contract analogue and the Simple Ledger Protocol compliant token issuance. In theory, SLP will improve the functionality of one of the oldest blockchains to match the current crypto-industry standards.