Daily Management Review

4 questions about Bitcoin Cash


08/02/2017


Months of intense debate in the crypto-currency community, fears and frenzied course jumps are over. The hardfork of bitcoin has taken place, but it did not lead to any terrible consequences. The new currency called Bitcoin Cash has skyrocketed on the first day of its existence and, justifying forecasts of analysts, has taken the third place in terms of capitalization among all crypto-currency.



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So, what is Bitcoin Cash?

1. What happened

On August 1, a new bitcoin - Bitcoin Cash (BCC) protocol was launched, a peer-to-peer e-currency for use on the Internet. Many exchanges and purses in advance expressed support for the new crypto currency and created conditions for operations with it, and the miners were able to transfer part of their capacity to Bitcoin Cash.

2. What is the difference between Bitcoin Cash and Bitcoin?

In fact, these are two different currencies. When Satoshi Nakamoto created bitcoin, he limited the block’s size with 1 MB. As the crypto currency gained popularity, this limit started to brake transactions and, as a consequence, the operation of the entire network. Bitcoin Cash offers an increased block, up to 8 MB, but the old bitcoin and its blockchain will continue to work, because not all mining pools support the idea of partitioning and will prefer to work with SegWit. In addition, Bitcoin Cash allows changing complexity of proof-of-work more often than every 2016 blocks (standard bitcoin interval). As part of the protection against reuse, Bitcoin Cash introduced a new type of transactions with additional benefits, such as signing inputs to improve the security of hardware wallets.

3. How to get Bitcoin Cash 

As already mentioned, some exchanges and purses already work with BCC (however, not all). Coinbase, for example, is not supporting operations with Bitcoin Cash. So right now you can safely go and buy a new currency. If at the time of the hardfork you had a certain number of bitcoins, then you automatically received an equal amount of BCC (again, provided that your exchange or purse supported Bitcoin Cash).

4. What does this mean for bitcoin

Price of bitcoin went up sharply on the eve of the hardfork: everyone rushed up to buy currency and get new coins for nothing. However, once Bitcoin Cash appeared, the crypto currency’s rate went down, and now it is trading around $ 2700. In less than a day, price of Bitcoin Cash soared from about $ 300 to $ 470, an increase of 70%. This does not mean that soon bitcoin will disappear altogether and all will switch to Bitcoin Cash. First, now it is necessary to wait for the first wave of popularity, and secondly, to wait for a decision on the scalability of bitcoin. 

source: coindesk.com