Bitcoin Cash is peer-to-peer electronic cash for the Internet. It is fully decentralized, with no central bank and requires no trusted third parties to operate. Bitcoin Cash is the continuation of the Bitcoin project as peer-to-peer digital cash. It is a fork of the Bitcoin blockchain ledger, with upgraded consensus rules that allow it to grow and scale. If you own a bitcoin then you should have some bitcoin cash also, because Bitcoin Cash is a fork of the ledger.
How is transaction replay being handled between the new and the old blockchain?
Bitcoin Cash transactions use a new flag SIGHASH_FORKID, which is non standard to the legacy blockchain. This prevents Bitcoin Cash transactions from being replayed on the Bitcoin blockchain and vice versa.
Why was a fork necessary to create Bitcoin Cash
The legacy Bitcoin code had a maximum limit of 1MB of data per block, or about 3 transactions per second. Although technically simple to raise this limit, the community could not reach a consensus, even after years of debate.
Was the 1 MB blocksize causing problems for Bitcoin
Yes, In 2017, capacity hit the ‘invisible wall’. Fees skyrocketed, and Bitcoin became unreliable, with some users unable to get their transactions confirmed, even after days of waiting.
Bitcoin stopped growing. Many users, merchants, businesses and investors abandoned Bitcoin. Its marketshare among other cryptocurrencies quickly plummeted from 95% to 40%.
Does Bitcoin Cash fix these problems
Yes. Bitcoin Cash immediately raises the blocksize limit to 8MB as part of a massive on-chain scaling approach. There will be ample capacity for everyone’s transactions.
Low fees and fast confirmations will resume with Bitcoin Cash. The network will be allowed to grow again. Users, merchants, businesses, and investors will return.
Why didn’t Bitcoin raise the blocksize if it was easy
Some of the developers did not understand and agree with the original vision of peer-to-peer electronic cash that Satoshi Nakamoto had created. Instead, they preferred Bitcoin become a settlement layer.
Many miners and users trusted these developers, while others recognized that they were leading the community down a different road than expected.
These two very different visions for Bitcoin are largely incompatible, which led to the community divide.
Which Development Team is In Charge of Bitcoin Cash
Unlike the previous situation in Bitcoin, there is no one single development team for Bitcoin Cash. There are now multiple independent teams of developers.
This decentralization of development (and decentralization of software implementations) is a much needed and important step forward.
