Bitcoin Cash (BCH) BCH

Bitcoin Cash (BCH) is a peer-to-peer cryptocurrency created in August 2017 by a hard fork of Bitcoin. It keeps Bitcoin’s design, a 21 million coin cap and proof-of-work mining, but allows much larger blocks so that more payments fit on-chain at low cost. Its supporters present it as Bitcoin used as everyday electronic cash rather than mainly as a store of value.

What is Bitcoin Cash?

Bitcoin Cash was born from the “block size war”, a long dispute inside the Bitcoin community. One camp wanted to scale Bitcoin through SegWit and second layers such as Lightning. The other wanted bigger blocks so that ordinary transactions stay cheap directly on the main chain. When Bitcoin miners locked in SegWit in July 2017, the big-block camp split off: on 1 August 2017, at block 478,559, Bitcoin Cash started its own chain. Everyone holding BTC at that moment received the same amount of BCH.

How Bitcoin Cash works

BCH works like Bitcoin. Miners secure the network with SHA-256 proof-of-work and a new block arrives about every 10 minutes. The differences are in the parameters and the roadmap:

• **Larger blocks:** the limit started at 8 MB in 2017 and was raised to 32 MB in 2018, against roughly 1 MB of base block size (plus SegWit data) on Bitcoin.
• **No SegWit:** BCH never adopted it and relies on block space instead.
• **Faster difficulty adjustment:** since November 2020 the ASERT algorithm adjusts mining difficulty at every block, which protects the chain when miners switch between BTC and BCH.
• **Own address format:** CashAddr addresses start with “bitcoincash:q” or “bitcoincash:p”, which helps avoid sending coins to the wrong chain.

The supply schedule is the same as Bitcoin’s: the block reward halves every 210,000 blocks (see how halvings work). After the April 2024 halving, miners receive 3.125 BCH per block, and issuance stops around 2140 just below 21 million coins.

Short history with key dates

• **1 August 2017:** fork from Bitcoin at block 478,559, with 8 MB blocks.
• **13 November 2017:** new difficulty adjustment algorithm.
• **May 2018:** block size raised to 32 MB and old script opcodes re-enabled.
• **November 2018:** contested upgrade; a minority leaves to create Bitcoin SV (BSV).
• **November 2020:** second split; the Bitcoin ABC team leaves and its chain later becomes eCash (XEC).
• **15 May 2023:** CashTokens bring native tokens and NFTs to BCH, together with P2SH32 addresses.
• **15 May 2025:** VM Limits and BigInt upgrades extend what smart contracts can compute.
• **15 May 2026:** Pay to Script, bounded loops, functions and bitwise operations activate, according to the Bitcoin Cash Node upgrade specifications.

Since 2020, upgrades have been agreed through public improvement proposals (CHIPs) and activate on a yearly schedule each 15 May.

What BCH is used for

The main use is payments: sending value worldwide in a few seconds of propagation, with fees that usually stay at a fraction of a cent. Some merchants and payment processors accept BCH, and many exchanges list it. Since CashTokens, developers can also issue fungible tokens and NFTs on the chain and build simple decentralized applications, although this ecosystem remains small compared with Ethereum.

Bitcoin Cash vs Bitcoin

Both share the same history up to 2017, the same cap and the same mining algorithm. Bitcoin chose small blocks, SegWit and layer-2 payment channels, and today attracts by far the most hash power, liquidity and institutional interest. Bitcoin Cash chose on-chain scaling, which keeps fees low but requires more storage and bandwidth from node operators. If you are new to the original network, start with our guide what is Bitcoin.

Risks and criticism

• **Lower security budget:** BCH uses the same SHA-256 hardware as Bitcoin but receives only a small share of the total hash power, so a well-funded attacker could in theory rent enough power to attack it.
• **Divided community:** two chain splits in 2018 and 2020 showed how hard it is to reach consensus, and left users with confusing forks.
• **Adoption:** merchant use of crypto payments remains limited, and stablecoins now compete for the same use case.
• **Volatility:** like every cryptocurrency, BCH can lose a large part of its value quickly.

How to store Bitcoin Cash

You can keep BCH on an exchange, but for long-term holdings a self-custody wallet is safer. Several software wallets support BCH and CashTokens, and widely used hardware wallets support BCH too. Always check that the address uses the CashAddr format and never send BCH to a Bitcoin (BTC) address. Write down your recovery phrase offline and keep it private; our guide to crypto wallets explains the options.