Bitcoin Cash

Bitcoin: the Regina George of cryptocurrency.

To understand Bitcoin cash, it helps to first understand what problem it was trying to solve: scaling Bitcoin. To put things simply, Bitcoin transactions take a while to process on the blockchain. The more transactions there are, the more time each transaction will take. So as Bitcoin grows in popularity, so does the transaction time. It’s like a theme park getting more and more popular, with lines for rides getting longer and longer.

Bitcoin cash was created to try to solve this problem. But they were not the first to tackle this problem. There was a vote held, in which 80-90% of mining pools agreed to incorporate a technology called SegWit2x into Bitcoin, which makes the blocks on the blockchain smaller and more manageable to process.

But of course, there were dissenters, and the whole point of blockchain technology is decentralization. The dissenters thought SegWit2x was a crappy Band-Aid to a growing problem, and had issues with transparency, which is kinda important for blockchain tech. So some Bitcoin miners and developers decided to make their own solution: Bitcoin cash.

Bitcoin cash is a break-off from Bitcoin, so it’s actually its own currency, trying to be the new cool kid on the block. Bitcoin cash tackles the problem of transaction speed and scalability by making the blocks bigger. However, critics say there could be some security issues with Bitcoin cash. You can’t win 'em all.