“If you come to a fork in the road, take it.” –Yogi Berra
When discussing crypto currencies, it’s important that we make a mention of a network fork, and give a prime example of what that looks like. When a network has a “fork” this means that there is a copy and change that is made to the blockchain, resulting in either a soft or hard fork. A soft fork is when slight changes are made to a blockchain, and the blockchain remains compatible with the pre-existing system. A hard fork is when such changes are made to a blockchain that the essence of the original blockchain is no longer in it’s integrity and becomes something new and new coins and systems and rules now exist.. An amazing use case of a fork, or a hard fork, more specifically, is Bitcoin Cash (BCH).
BCH is simply a fork of the Bitcoin blockchain network. Created in 2017, the purpose of this new fork was to make transactions faster, more efficient and therefore more reliable. As the transaction and information traffic as well as interest in the BTC network began to grow, there came desires amongst a community of developers to make the system more efficient through increasing the size of the blocks in the chain, originally from the 1MB blocks of info to 8MB. Issues began to rise in the BTC network for transactions to process, because there were simply too many for the protocol to handle. Those who supported this fork were fans of having Bitcoin as a medium of transfer and a more applicable and viable money asset rather than a digital investment and store of value. On 08/01/2017 the blocks were made larger and more information was able to be processed in the same step, increasing the speeds and transaction efficiency of the protocol and BCH was born, both as a new coin and blockchain.
Some would say that they (BCH and BTC) are two variants of the same, some would say they are completely different, both would be right to a certain extent. Bitcoin Cash is very similar to BTC in essence, they have a PoW system where miners can mine for coins and the supply is capped at 21 Million coins, of course, this is where Bitcoin cash came from. BCH continues their vision to have a very usable currency in the same sphere as BTC, and they innovate and adapt to rising issues as time passes. Block sizes have now increased to sizes of 32 MB, helping BCH to carry on the torch of making things faster, cheaper and more reliable for transfers than the investment asset from which it derived. BTC continues to give BCH a run for its money, however, with lowering transaction costs and the varying average block sizes of BCH.
In a fascinating turn of events, around a year later after the birth of BCH, there was a hard fork in their network resulting in Bitcoin Cash ABC and Bitcoin Cash SV. This fork resulted from a disagreement in the use of smart contracts in the protocol; Bitcoin Cash ABC made the changes to the original blockchain to make the blocks more organized resulting in faster and more reliable data exchange. Where improvement can come in any aspect of crypto, it will come indeed.
In conclusion: BCH is a fork of Bitcoin which seeks to make it’s currency viable and reliable for everyday transactions through innovated and enlarged data transfer processes. Bitcoin Cash is one of the most popular assets out there today and is definitely here to stay with their commitment to continue to innovate and upgrade. Forks always lead to more forks and innovation always leads to more innovation. The process of growth is never ceasing and this is incredibly evident in the realm of cryptocurrency. We hope you enjoyed, send us some feedback and stay tuned for more! Thank you!
