You don’t understand the difference between Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash and want to know more so you won’t make mistakes anymore? Decryption.
The Bitcoin blockchain is, at the moment, considered as one of the safest in the world. The fact that it is the majority that verifies transactions, and not an individual alone or a central entity, changes many things. Unfortunately, transaction times are important because the network would tend to be saturated: users tend to increase while the blockchain remains the same.
Indeed, the Bitcoin network can process up to 7 transactions per second that take about 10 minutes to execute.
By way of comparison, VISA processes nearly 150 million transactions per day or about 1600 transactions… every second.
The various debates of recent months have highlighted the scalability of this architecture, its ability to adapt to ever-increasing uses.
Two solutions stand out: reduce the amount of information included in each block… or increase the size of the blocks (in order to process more information).
However, it should be noted that most of the computing power of the Bitcoin network was, until recently, 80% owned by pools and mining companies. In 2017, they decided to incorporate SegWit2x technology.
This technology reduces the data to be validated in each block by deleting the signature data from the data block to be processed per transaction.
Bitcoin cash was launched by a consensus of miners and developers concerned about improving the speed and fluidity of the Bitcoin network but who were very sceptical about the adoption of SegWit2x and feared a lack of transparency regarding the introduction of SegWit2x.
This is the reason why this miner’s consensus launched, in 2017, a “hard fork”, a kind of duplication of the blockchain, creating a new blockchain on which a new cryptocurrency is evolving: the Bitcoin Cash. This new cryptocurrency had a larger block than those of Bitcoin (8 Mo instead of 2 Mo) and the objective was to accelerate the speed of verification of the blocks within particular an adjustable level of difficulty (algorithms) to avoid saturating the network when the number of minors would become too large.
But this has called into question the security of the entire network: security vs. speed was the dilemma. And it remains intact.
Currently, Bitcoin still remains the network considered to be the most secure but improving the speed of transactions is a problem. Bitcoin Cash would, therefore, allow much faster transaction processing: 2 minutes and 30 seconds, while it takes Bitcoin 10 minutes to validate a block.
This is due to the size of the blocks (8 Mo for Bitcoin Cash instead of 2 Mo for Bitcoin = validation time divided by 4). On the other hand, the security of Bitcoin Cash’s network is often a source of criticism and questions.
In summary:
- Bitcoin is the first crypto-currency and works as a pair-to-pair on the Blockchain.
- Bitcoin Cash was launched by miners and computer scientists from Bitcoin who were concerned about the future of Bitcoin and in particular its ability to evolve effectively over time. To improve the scalability of Bitcoin, they proceeded with a hard fork.
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