Bitcoin’s (BTC) code is the basis for an entire genre of cryptocurrency. Dozens of altcoins are based on the original legacy blockchain, but only one tried to hard fork and replace it. Bitcoin Cash (BCH) is a derivative of the original chain that separated from the main community in 2017. The Bitcoin Cash group did not trust upcoming proposed changes – including the somewhat controversial Segregated Witness system. As such, they hard forked the Bitcoin blockchain and created their own currency, which has gained considerable ground since.
Unfortunately, Bitcoin Cash or BCH does not present itself as a new currency. Advocates of the fork are insistent that it is a full replacement for the original blockchain. BCH tends to sit right at 10% of the value of the original chain, while consistently placing in the top 5 cryptocurrencies by market cap. BCH is also available for trade on the largest exchanges, including a much-coveted spot on Coinbase.
Bitcoin Cash’s Media Takeover
While Bitcoin’s development team rely mostly on the blockchain’s sheer momentum, Bitcoin Cash did not have that option. In their attempts to supplant the core Bitcoin project, they have had to enact a full-scale media blitz. Their greatest triumph lay in their control of www.bitcoin.com. Although they’ve received flak for perceived deception, the site undoubtedly provides a major avenue of investment for the newer Bitcoin fork.
Further, Roger Ver is one of the more active faces of cryptocurrency on social media. His high level of activity helps keep Bitcoin Cash afloat, despite several high-profile problems over the past quarter. This includes one point where joke cryptocurrency Dogecoin exceeded BCH’s transaction volume. Bitcoin Cash successfully established itself as a functioning, investment-worthy cryptocurrency. However, to survive into the future of the blockchain industry, they’ll need to prove that they bring something to the table that Bitcoin does not.
Segregated Witness
At the heart of the BTC vs. BCH conflict lay the Segregated Witness system. While only a theoretical update when the fork occurred, SegWit is now up and running on the Bitcoin blockchain. Through a clever means of rearranging the codebase, the individual size for each block on the chain could be altered – slightly. As Bitcoin began suffering serious scalability issues at the end of 2017, the increase of each block from 1 megabyte to 1.8 is still substantial. Coupled with the Lightning Network platform coming into service, many of the traffic issues that plagued BTC are a thing of the past. As such, BCH now has a much steeper hill to climb before they can claim to be the true Bitcoin.
