Bitcoin Cash (BCH) Before Investing You Need To Know

What is Bitcoin Cash?

Bitcoin Cash (BCH) is a peer-to-peer electronic cash system that aims to become sound global money with fast payments, micro fees, privacy, and high transaction capacity (big blocks). In the same way that physical money, such as a dollar bill, is handed directly to the person being paid, Bitcoin Cash payments are sent directly from one person to another.

Bitcoin Cash requires no trusted third parties and no central bank permissionless, decentralized cryptocurrency. Unlike traditional fiat money, BCH does not depend on monetary middlemen like banks and payment processors. As a result, transactions cannot be censored by governments or other centralized corporations. Similarly, funds cannot be seized or frozen — because financial third parties have no control over the BCH network.

What is Bitcoin Cash used for?

Bitcoin Cash combines gold-like scarcity with the spendable nature of cash. With a limited total supply of 21 million coins, BCH is provably scarce and, like physical cash, can be easily spent. Transactions are fast, with transaction fees typically less than a tenth of a cent. Anybody can accept Bitcoin Cash payments with a smartphone or computer.

Bitcoin Cash has various use cases. In addition to peer-to-peer payments between individuals, BCH can be used to pay participating merchants for goods and services in-store and online. Very low fees enable new microtransaction economies, such as tipping content creators and rewarding app users a few cents. BCH also reduces the fees and settlement times for remittances and cross-border trade. Other use cases include tokens, simplified smart contracts, and private payments with tools such as CashShuffle and CashFusion.

Is Bitcoin Cash different from Bitcoin?

In 2017, the Bitcoin project and its community split in two over concerns about Bitcoin’s scalability. The result was a hard fork that created Bitcoin Cash, a new cryptocurrency considered by supporters to be the legitimate continuation of the Bitcoin project as peer-to-peer electronic cash. All Bitcoin holders at the time of the fork (block 478,558) automatically became owners of BCH. Bitcoin, invented by the pseudonymous Satoshi Nakomoto, remains a separate cryptocurrency.

Unlike Bitcoin (BTC), BCH aims to scale to meet the demands of a global payment system. Therefore, at the split time, the BCH block size was increased from 1MB to 8MB. An increased block size means BCH can now handle significantly more transactions per second (TPS) while keeping fees extremely low, solving the issues of payment delays and high fees experienced by some users on the Bitcoin BTC network.

As of October 2021, BCH has a block size of 32MB, compared to Bitcoin’s block size of 1MB.

How do you mine Bitcoin Cash?

Mining is how new Bitcoin Cash transactions are confirmed, and new blocks are added to the BCH blockchain. Miners use computing power and electricity to solve complex puzzles. By doing so, they can produce new blocks of transactions. If one of their blocks is accepted by the network, the miner, or mining pool, earns a block reward in the form of newly-issued BCH.

Mining is highly competitive. As the price of Bitcoin Cash in the marketplace rises, more miners are incentivized to bring more hash rates into the ever-increasing miner competition to produce blocks and have them accepted by the BCH network. More miners make the network more secure by increasing and distributing the hash rate. This prevents a single miner from having control over the network.

Anyone can mine BCH. Mining requires specialized hardware called mining equipment, which can be bought or rented. Miners also need to run a full node software (with most miners currently running BCHN) to build blocks and connect to the rest of the Bitcoin Cash network. Mining can be done independently, but miners often pool their hash rate and share proportionally in the earned block rewards.

How do you buy Bitcoin Cash?

Bitcoin Cash is available at various crypto exchanges, depending on your region. Click on our BCH market pairs tab for the latest list of exchanges and trading pairs for this cryptocurrency.

BCH is available on many top exchanges, such as Binance, Huobi Global, Coinbase, FTX, Gate.io and more.

Also Read: Litecoin (LTC) Information For Beginners