Bitcoin Cash (BCH) is a cryptocurrency created by splitting away from Bitcoin in 2017, with the explicit goal of making on-chain payments faster and cheaper for everyday use. Where Bitcoin evolved toward a store-of-value model supported by second-layer solutions, Bitcoin Cash made a different bet: that raising the block size limit directly was the better path to peer-to-peer electronic cash.
Background
To understand Bitcoin Cash, you have to understand the problem it was trying to solve — and why that problem was contentious enough to split an entire community.
Bitcoin processes transactions by bundling them into blocks, each of which has a size limit. As Bitcoin’s popularity grew, that limit became a genuine bottleneck. Blocks would fill up, transactions would sit waiting in the mempool, and users had to pay higher fees to get their transactions confirmed promptly. For small, everyday payments — buying a coffee, sending a few dollars across borders — the fees and delays made Bitcoin impractical.
Two camps emerged. One argued that keeping blocks small preserved decentralization (since larger blocks require more bandwidth and storage to run a node) and that payment scalability should come from second-layer networks like the Lightning Network. The other camp argued that raising the block size was straightforward, safe, and necessary to fulfill the original vision of Bitcoin as peer-to-peer electronic cash.
Bitcoin Cash embodies the second position. Its core promise is simple: low fees and reliable confirmations, achieved by allowing larger blocks and therefore more transactions per block.
History
Bitcoin Cash came into existence through a hard fork — a permanent divergence in the blockchain — in August 2017. Anyone who held Bitcoin at the time of the fork automatically received an equal amount of BCH. The fork was driven by a coalition of miners, developers, and businesses who had grown frustrated with the pace of Bitcoin’s scaling debate.
The initial block size increase set BCH apart immediately. Within roughly a year, the maximum block size was increased again, a sign that the project’s developers were willing to keep adjusting the parameter as demand required.
Bitcoin Cash itself then experienced its own contentious split. In late 2018, a disagreement over protocol changes — including a new opcode system championed by one faction — led to another hard fork that created Bitcoin SV (BSV). The split was acrimonious, involving a well-publicized “hash war” in which miners competed to establish which chain would accumulate more proof-of-work. Bitcoin Cash and Bitcoin SV went their separate ways, and BCH continued under the original ticker.
Since then, Bitcoin Cash has pursued steady, incremental development. Upgrades have included improvements to its smart contract capabilities (though BCH is not primarily a smart contract platform), privacy features, and tooling for developers. The project has attracted particular interest in regions where low-cost remittances and payments matter most.
Technology
Bitcoin Cash uses the same fundamental architecture as Bitcoin: proof of work consensus secured by SHA-256 mining, a roughly ten-minute block time, and cryptographic hashing to chain blocks together. If you understand how the Bitcoin blockchain works, you already understand most of Bitcoin Cash’s plumbing.
The key technical distinction is the block size limit. Bitcoin Cash allows blocks that are substantially larger than Bitcoin’s, which means each block can carry many more transactions. In practice this keeps fees low even when the network is busy, since there is usually room in the next block for your transaction without requiring you to outbid other users.
The core tradeoff: Larger blocks mean more transactions per block and lower fees — but they also mean that running a full node requires more disk space and bandwidth over time. Critics argue this gradually concentrates node operation among well-resourced participants; supporters argue the effect is manageable and worth the payment benefits.
Bitcoin Cash also differs from Bitcoin in some protocol details — including how it calculates transaction signing — which means BCH and BTC wallets and addresses are not interchangeable, even though they share a common history up to the 2017 fork.
Bitcoin Cash has no built-in smart contract system comparable to Ethereum’s EVM, though it supports a scripting language for basic programmable transactions. Developers have built payment-focused tools and some decentralized applications on top of BCH, but the ecosystem is considerably smaller than Ethereum or even other layer-1 networks.
For a practical comparison of how exchanges handle BCH versus other assets, see our guide to crypto exchanges.
Tokenomics
Bitcoin Cash shares Bitcoin’s supply model almost exactly, which is by design — it was meant to be a continuation of the original vision, not a reinvention.
| Property | Detail |
|---|---|
| Maximum supply | 21,000,000 BCH |
| Issuance | Block rewards to miners, halving roughly every four years |
| Current utility | Payments, transfers, store of value |
| Staking | None — BCH uses proof of work |
Miners are rewarded with newly issued BCH for each block they add to the chain, plus the transaction fees collected from that block. As with Bitcoin, the block reward halves at regular intervals, gradually reducing new supply until the maximum is reached. This deflationary issuance schedule means that, like Bitcoin, BCH relies on transaction fees becoming the primary miner incentive once new issuance runs low — a dynamic that is still decades away.
There is no staking, no governance token, and no protocol-level burn mechanism. BCH’s tokenomics are deliberately simple. The value proposition rests on adoption as a payment medium rather than on complex incentive structures.
For a deeper look at how supply schedules and halvings work, see crypto supply explained.
In summary
Bitcoin Cash is a direct descendant of Bitcoin, born from a genuine disagreement about how a blockchain-based payment system should scale. It trades some of Bitcoin’s conservatism for lower fees and higher throughput on the base layer. Whether that tradeoff is the right one — and whether it positions BCH as a lasting payments network or a historical footnote — remains an open question. As with all cryptocurrencies, understanding the technology and the underlying tradeoffs is the starting point for any informed opinion. This page is educational; nothing here is financial advice.
Last reviewed January 1, 2026.