Bitcoin Cash (BCH) is a peer-to-peer digital cash system that emerged in the market in the summer of 2017 as a result of the hard fork on the Bitcoin chain. The fork took place as the Bitcoin community split after numerous major arguments about the block size, scaling issues and the SegWit upgrade.
Bitcoin Cash enters the world
Bitcoin Cash emerged as a totally separate cryptocurrency based on the modified Bitcoin code. It also gained support from an early crypto entrepreneur and Bitcoin investor Roger Ver, who prior to that was famous in the community as “Bitcoin Jesus.” Believing that Bitcoin was going farther and farther from the original Satoshi Nakamoto’s plan, he took the side of the newly created Bitcoin Cash currency, proclaiming that it is in fact the real Bitcoin as Satoshi saw it. Besides, Ver and other proponents of BCH believed that unless Bitcoin blocks were expanded in size, constantly rising fees on the Bitcoin chain would prevent the cryptocurrency’s further growth and eventually hinder its worldwide adoption.
Those who wanted Bitcoin to keep the original small blocks were concerned that an increase in the block size might lead to the blockchain becoming centralized and vulnerable to 51% attacks since hosting full nodes in that case would be much harder. Eventually, Bitcoin Cash came up with a block size of 8 Mb and that limit was increased to 32 Mb a year later to make the process of transaction verification faster, avoid congestion in the mempool and higher fees charged by miners.
Currently, Bitcoin Cash is the 14th largest cryptocurrency with a market cap totalling $11,693,539,563, BCH is trading at $595.
Roger Ver and Bitcoin Cash, BCH hardfork Bitcoin SV
An early Bitcoin investor and adopter entrepreneur Roger Ver got a nickname “Bitcoin Jesus” for his rigorous support of BTC. He bought the Bitcoin.com domain and used it for raising awareness about BTC until the 2017 hardfork.
After that, the Bitcoin.com site focused on Bitcoin Cash and crypto trading. Now, Ver still owns it but he does not run it as a CEO. Recently, Ver has published a book in collaboration with Steve Patterson, a notable figure in the cryptocurrency space. The book is titled “Hijacking Bitcoin” and it lays out Ver’s theory on how Bitcoin became corrupted and centralized after the main community of miners and developers stepped away from the original ideas on which Satoshi Nakamoto created Bitcoin.
In 2018, Bitcoin Cash underwent its own first hardfork which resulted in the emergence of Bitcoin SV (Satoshi Vision) cryptocurrency. The team of the miners and developers who took that step was led by the Australian software scientist Craig Wright, who proclaimed himself to be Satoshi Nakamoto (and the author of the original Bitcoin white paper) and began filing lawsuits against anyone who called him a liar in public.
In the middle of March, Wright lost the lawsuit in the UK court against COPA (the Crypto Open Patent Alliance) and the judge officially denied him to be the original Bitcoin creator.
Bitcoin Cash halving 2024, BCH price prediction
Since Bitcoin Cash also runs on the proof-of-work consensus algorithm, similarly to Bitcoin, Litecoin and many other cryptos, it also has halving, when miners' rewards get cut down in half, thus making the cryptocurrency more deflationary and cutting down its circulating supply. These events are of key importance for the price of the cryptocurrency they happen to. Bitcoin’s fourth halving is scheduled for the second half of April and it will see miners’ rewards plunge from 6.25 BTC to 3.125 BTC.
The first BCH halving occurred in 2020. The second one took place on April 3. The reduction of the miners’ rewards was the same as that expected for Bitcoin – it has fallen from 6.25 BCH to 3.125 BCH already. This means that potentially, the BCH price can undergo a large increase this year or next.
Similarly to Bitcoin, the total Bitcoin Cash supply amounts to 21,000,000 BCH.
19,687,400 BCH has already been minted by miners. The coin has so far reached an all-time high of $4,355 in December 2017. At the moment, BCH is trading almost 90% below that peak.
In May 2021, BCH reached a massive high of $1,342 per coin and it started 2024, trading in the $250 range. Over the last week, the Bitcoin’s hardfork BCH rose by a massive 44%, soaring slightly above $700. By now, Bitcoin Cash has declined 15.10%. By the end of 2024, experts believe that the coin has the potential to recover the $1,500 high.
A potential surge that is anticipated by analysts over the next four years (the third BCH halving is scheduled for 2028) varies from over $2,000 to $4,500, depending on a set of various factors that emerge from both fundamental and technical analysis.
