Bitcoin Cash (BCH)

Bitcoin Cash, BCH, is a cryptocurrency and a variant of Bitcoin Classic, BTC. It forked off from BTC the 1st of August in 2017. BCH is similar to BTC. It was created as a means to offset perceived shortcomings of BTC, namely, the 1 megabyte block size. Bitcoin Cash, at the time of the fork, had a block size of 8 MB and that size has now increased to 32 megabytes. Bitcoin Cash also incorporates an emergency difficulty adjustment algorithm that corrects for difficulty more rapidly than BTC. Upon block 478558, anyone possessing BTC automatically inherited BCH. BCH transactions can be confirmed on the order of minutes, whereas BTC can require days. The cost to undertake a transaction is a fraction of a dollar. As of July 7, 2018, the transaction fee for BTC was 64 cents. BCH to fiat currency conversions by merchants incur lower costs than for credit card use. BCH Transaction fees have not exceeded 20 cents USD since February 2018.

The motivation to develop BCH stemmed from the perception that BTC had become costly and unreliable to utilize. The creators of Bitcoin Cash blamed this problem on a failure by the Bitcoin Classic community to decide what was a good policy regarding the size of network capacity. The creators of BCH felt some members of the Bitcoin community had a view of the network in conflict with that of Satoshi Nakamoto. They regard these deficiencies in the network as the motivation for a profound drop in crypto market share, as much as 55%, by BTC. The problem was that BTC blocks were given a ceiling of 1 MB, which some felt hurt processing speeds. Originally a measure to defend against spam, as block size grew, there was a fear that because of this feature, blocksize might one day become on par with this limit, causing processing to take longer.

It is hoped that transactions using the methodology in Bitcoin Cash will allow transaction volumes that are competitive with credit cards. Visa, for example, has a mean per second processing rate of 1,700 transactions. The BTC network required an average of 20.07 minutes per block for the 7 days between July 1 and July 7, 2018 and processed roughly 2 transactions per second, on average, over that same period, a small fraction of 1700. As of July 7, 2018, the 7 day average for BCH block confirmation time is 9.9 minutes. And the average transaction rate for that same period was .5 transactions per minute.

In addition, more flexible difficulty control as currently implemented means the difficulty level is less influenced by how many miners there are, one goal being to stabilize processing times. Segregated witness is not included in the fork, as it was for BTC, meaning signature information remains inside the block. In BTC, as much as 65% of data comprises this subset in a given block.

Drawbacks: There is concern among BTC users that BCH's larger block necessitates more powerful computer processing, lending a dangerous advantage to a minority of corporations and excluding miners with fewer resources. Difficulty control that is less affected by the number of miners could have security implications.

Coinbase is one exchange for convenient conversion from USD to BCH. Kraken is useful for converting from EUR to BCH.
A comprehensive list of exchanges can be found on the BCH webpage: https://www.bitcoincash.org/

Resources:

https://cointelegraph.com/tags/bitcoin-cash

https://www.bitcoincash.org/

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BCH Price July 24 2018

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