Bitcoin Cash

Bitcoin Cash (BCH) is a hard fork of the cryptocurrency bitcoin. The bitcoin scalability debate led to the hard fork on August 1, 2017, which resulted in the creation of a new blockchain. The stated goal of the fork was to increase the number of transactions its ledger can process by increasing the block size limit to eight megabytes.

Unlike most cryptocurrencies, Bitcoin Cash's development is decentralized and maintained by a wallet developers, as oppose to a select team working on a single reference implementation. This was done in order to avoid clash that lead to Cash's creation in the first place by allowing for a consensuses of all parties.

History
Bitcoin Cash began with the reference implementation known as Bitcoin ABC that took place on August, 1, 2017 with a different vision on how to solve the scalability problem. Upon launch, Bitcoin Cash inherited the transaction history of the bitcoin cryptocurrency on that date, but all later transactions were separate. Block 478558 was the last common block and thus the first Bitcoin Cash block was 478559. Bitcoin Cash cryptocurrency wallet started to reject BTC block and BTC transactions since 13:20 UTC, August 1, 2017 because it used a timer to initiate a fork. It implements a block size increase to 8 MB. One exchange started Bitcoin Cash futures trading at 0.5 BTC on July 23; the futures dropped to 0.1 BTC by July 30. Market cap appeared since 23:15 UTC, August 1, 2017.

Adoption
Bitcoin Cash has seen widespread adoptio. Many merchants and services have added the currency to their payment options with more being added by the day. It has a value of above or over $1,000, as of January, 2018.

Wallets
Due to the nature of Bitcoin Cash's decentralized development, Bitcoin Cash lists varies types of wallets. Wallets derived from Core, such as ABC and Unlimited, are considered nodes, due to their full inclusion of the blockchain, while Electrum is considered a wallet.

Address format
Bitcoin Cash shared the same alphanumeric address style until January, 2018. The new address style features no uppercase letters, and generally features the letter q and may feature the "bitcoincash:" prefix, known as CashAddr. Address conversation is provided on-demand or as part of the wallet or service. BitPay also created their own address format for Bitcoin format. An example from BitPay is provided in the table.