A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System.
- Bitcoin Cash (BCH) is a peer-to-peer electronic cash system, which aims to enable “new economies with low fee micro-transactions, large business transactions, and permissionless spending”.
- Bitcoin Cash originated from an upgrade proposal of Bitcoin, that increased the maximum block size from 1 megabyte to 8 megabytes, which ultimately led to a hard-fork on August 1st, 2017 . Since then, additional changes have been approved, such as a new difficulty adjustment algorithm, the support of new opcodes, Schnorr Signatures, and further extensions in the block size.
- Bitcoin Cash uses the same SHA-256d-based Proof-of-Work consensus mechanism as Bitcoin. Bitcoin Cash also has a target block time of 10 minutes, and its total supply is capped at 21 million.
- On November 16th 2018, the Bitcoin Cash blockchain withstood another hard-fork, which resulted in a chain split into Bitcoin Cash SV and Bitcoin Cash ABC. Since then, Bitcoin Cash ABC has commonly used the BCH ticker and referred to as Bitcoin Cash.
- The Bitcoin Cash network has protocol upgrades twice a year, on November 15th and May 15th. These upgrades are required for all node operators . For instance, on May 15th 2018, Bitcoin Cash upgraded to increase its block size to 32 megabytes.
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