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Bitcoin Cash: The Big-Block Fork Built for Everyday Payments
A 2017 split from Bitcoin over block size, and what followed
Bitcoin Cash (BCH) split from Bitcoin in August 2017, created by people who believed bigger blocks were needed for cheap payments at scale. As its name suggests, it puts everyday ‘electronic cash’ first.
1. Born from the block-size war
From around 2015, Bitcoin’s community was divided over rising fees at busy times. One side wanted to keep the block-size limit and add SegWit (separating signature data) plus second layers such as the Lightning Network; the other wanted bigger blocks so more transactions fit on the chain itself.
Miners, developers and businesses on the big-block side carried out a hard fork (a rule change that splits the chain) on 1 August 2017. Anyone holding bitcoin at the split received the same amount of BCH. No company runs it; independent teams such as Bitcoin Cash Node (BCHN) build its software.
2. Same skeleton, bigger blocks
BCH uses Bitcoin’s SHA-256 proof of work (computers competing to make blocks), targets a block every ten minutes and shares the 21 million maximum supply, with halvings about every four years, most recently in April 2024. The difference is block size: 8 MB at launch, 32 MB from 2018, and since May 2024 a limit that adjusts automatically to usage (ABLA).
Because miners can easily move their machines to Bitcoin, a per-block difficulty algorithm keeps block times steady. CashTokens, launched in May 2023, let users issue tokens and NFTs directly on the chain, and a May 2025 upgrade greatly raised the computing limits for smart-contract code. Upgrades usually arrive on 15 May each year.
3. A history of splits
BCH itself split twice more. In November 2018 a camp wanting far larger blocks left as Bitcoin SV (BSV), and in November 2020 a dispute over diverting part of the mining reward to developers ended with another branch becoming today’s eCash (XEC).
Today BCH is used in payment wallets, by some merchants and on exchanges, and CashTokens have enabled decentralised exchanges and token projects. On the Crypto Nation map, BCH is the city-hall tower of Bitcoin Cash City, because it is the chain’s own coin.
4. Things to know
BCH runs on the same mining machines as Bitcoin but has far less total mining power (hash rate), so critics say it is more exposed to ‘51% attacks’. In 2019, just after an upgrade, two mining pools jointly rewrote blocks to stop someone using a loophole to take others’ coins, an episode that showed how concentrated its mining is.
Repeated splits divided the community and the brand, and some argue payment use has not grown as early backers hoped. Bitcoin supporters say bigger blocks make nodes costlier to run and weaken decentralisation; BCH supporters reply that on-chain payments were Bitcoin’s original purpose. The debate remains unresolved.
Written from information public up to October 2026. It does not recommend or rate any coin and is not investment advice. If something is wrong, please tell us through the contact page.