Bitcoin Cash, controversies and uses

• Financial

Bitcoin Cash is a cryptocurrency that is a fork of Bitcoin. Bitcoin Cash is a spin-off or altcoin that was created in 2017. On 21 July 2017, bitcoin miners locked-in a software upgrade referred to as Bitcoin Improvement Proposal (BIP) 91, which meant that the Segregated Witness upgrade would activate at block 477,120.

Segwit controversially would enable second layer solutions on Bitcoin such as the Lightning Network. A group of Bitcoin activists, developers, and China-based miners were unhappy with Bitcoin's proposed SegWit improvement plans meant to increase Bitcoin's capacity; these stakeholders pushed forward alternative plans which would increase the block size limit to eight megabytes through a hard fork.

In 2017 there were two factions of Bitcoin supporters: those that supported large blocks and those who preferred small blocks. The Bitcoin Cash faction favors the use of its currency as a medium of exchange for commerce, while the Bitcoin-supporting faction view Bitcoin's primary use as that of a store of value.

Bitcoin Cash, controversies and uses

Bitcoin Cash is sometimes also referred to as Bcash. Bitcoin Cash detractors call the cryptocurrency Bcash, Btrash, or a scam, while its supporters maintain that it is the pure form of Bitcoin.

Bitcoin Cash trades on digital currency exchanges using the Bitcoin Cash name and the BCH currency code for the cryptocurrency. On 26 March 2018, OKEx removed all Bitcoin Cash trading pairs except for BCH/BTC, BCH/ETH and BCH/USDT due to inadequate liquidity.

As of May 2018, daily transaction numbers for Bitcoin Cash are about one-tenth of those of bitcoin. Coinbase listed Bitcoin Cash on 19 December 2017 and the Coinbase platform experienced price abnormalities that led to an insider trading investigation.

As of August 2018, Bitcoin Cash payments are supported by payment service providers such as BitPay, Coinify and GoCoin. Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash target a new block to be generated every ten minutes on average. The time needed to calculate a new block is influenced by a parameter called the mining difficulty.

If the total amount of mining power increases, an increase of the mining difficulty can keep the block time roughly constant. Vice versa, if the mining power decreases, a decrease of the mining difficulty can keep the block time roughly constant.

Bitcoin DAA fails to generate new blocks at a constant rate as long as the hash supply is elastic. In contrast to that, the group demonstrated that Bitcoin Cash DAA is stable even when the cryptocurrency price is volatile and the supply of hash power is highly elastic.