Bitcoin Cash
The size of the bitcoin block has bothered a number of developers, miners, and others involved in the popular cryptocurrency. It seems that the limit of 1 megabyte as the block size means that only 7 transactions can be handled in one second. Because of the number of transactions increasing, this can cause the system to lag.
On August 1, 2017, the protocol was changed making the block size limit 8 megabytes. The result was that the new currency was not the same as the bitcoin core so it had to fork into two streams of currency.
The first bitcoin cash block was mined 6 hours after bitcoin’s block 478558 was mined. This was the last entry in the blockchain before mining the first bitcoin cash block. It held 6,985 transactions and was nearly 2 MB in size – 1.915 MB.
Holders as of block 478558 were suddenly owners of both versions of bitcoin. If you owned a bitcoin on that date, it split into two and for every bitcoin you had, you received bitcoin cash. After that, you had both currencies in your wallet. Bitcoin cash carries the same transaction history as bitcoin up to that point.
Bitcoin’s block 478558 had 331 transactions. Bitcoin’s next block 478559 had 472 transactions. During its first 3 months, bitcoin cash performed well, starting around $300 USD per coin with a couple of peaks of $700. At the time this seemed fairly promising. Then, in November way back then it went over $1,000 and it seemed to be holding steady at the new high. No one had any idea at that time the growth Bitcoin would see in coming years. To give you some perspective it closed August 2020 at $11,657 per coin.
With even more unbelievable to growth to come. Since then it has risen steadily, and done some falling to sit at the $57,834.36 mark in November 2021. It’s currently hovering around $48,835.60 in December 2021.
Not too long ago there were endless news reports claiming that cryptocurrency is a foolish fad and that it cannot be taken seriously. The doubters also said it is a cover for criminal transactions and it is a scam. In spite of these anti-cryptoites, which were usually the traditional banks and stocks financial people, all those claims lost almost all of their steam. The idea of decentralized currency is upsetting to traditional banks and that’s how the negativity enjoyed a shelf-life for some years.
While upsetting to banks, the idea of DeFi(decentralized finance) has really caught on the last few years. New crypto coins like Solana, Cardano and Tehter are some of the up-and-coming coins on the market. Don’t worry though Bitcoin has the same protection, privacy, and potential it had and continues to have. And it’s popularity only continues to grow, hitting its all-time high last November.
Miners dig for the hash power of newer coins the same way they used to for Bitcoin. In the beginning, it was slow going and Bitcoin miners were not too eager to keep digging. But just like time has lead to the development of new coins, the mining process has also become easier. And mining popularity amongst the new currencies is growing, too.
In today’s world of crypto finances, Ethereum has been running second to Bitcoin in the overall ranking of all cryptocurrencies. Another newcomer Binance has moved into third place. In November 2020, Bitcoin had a market cap of $337,336,592,123.07 and a price of $18,177.48. Its volume was $31,133,957,704.27 and there were 18,557,937 BTC in circulation at that point. Right behind it in November 2020 was Ethereum. It had a market cap of $65,424,084,296.29 and its price was $575.76. Its volume is $15,017,517,758.17 with 113,631,211 in circulation.
Figures change frequently. To keep an eye on the future values of cryptocurrencies, users are advised to follow the prices at a site such as https://bitcointipstoday.com by simply checking out the ticker at the top of any of our pages. As usual, past performance is no indication of future results and time will tell what the future holds.
