Bitcoin Cash emerges alongside bitcoin after hard fork
At around 8:15 a.m. local time on Tuesday evening, the first block was created that was no longer accepted by nodes on the bitcoin network. With that, the announced hard fork was a success and a new cryptocurrency was created under the name Bitcoin Cash or BCC.
This hard fork is the first in the history of bitcoin. It was uncertain for a while when the first block with a size of more than 1MB, the limit on the bitcoin blockchain, would be created, but about six hours after the start of the project, the first block with a size of about 1.9MB. This was mined by the Chinese ViaBTC. This was followed by a smaller block with the text ‘Hello World’ and it was possible to trade Bitcoin Cash. At the time of writing, the price is around 340 euros, compared to the bitcoin price of approximately 2300 euros. It now remains to be seen how the price of the new currency will develop and how many miners are behind it.
Bitcoin Cash aims to provide an alternative to bitcoin. The SegWit upgrade of the bitcoin network, which miners agreed on in July, did not go far enough for Chinese Asic company Bitmain. That is why the current hard fork was created as a backup plan. Instead of SegWit and a block size increased to 2MB, this variant uses blocks of up to 8MB, which according to the initiators should be more scalable. The larger blocks make it possible to perform more transactions per second. The number of transactions has been a problem for bitcoin for a long time. The cryptocurrency suffered from long waiting times and high costs per transaction.
Bitcoin owners who had control over their private keys before the fork have both bitcoin and BCC afterwards. For example, for others who have their bitcoins on an exchange, they are dependent on the policy of the exchange. Kraken and Bittrex, among others, participate in the trading of BCC. Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong left know that he does not intend to take any hasty steps, but that it is not inconceivable that ‘new assets’ will be added to the exchange.