Bitcoin Cash Celebrates Its First Birthday: From a Hard Fork to Easy Going

One year ago to the day, Bitcoin Cash (BCH)
came into existence after a hard fork from the Bitcoin blockchain.
It has been an interesting 12 months since the fork gave birth to BCH, as proponents have continuously argued the merits between Bitcoin (BTC) and BCH. Nevertheless, on the anniversary of the creation of Bitcoin Cash, it is worth revisiting what caused this altcoin to come into existence and what it aimed to do.
How did we get here
Since its inception in 2009, Bitcoin’s user base has steadily grown over the better part of a decade. In the past three years, this has caused some ‘growing pains,’ as the original parameters that govern the blockchain led to issues with transaction speeds and costs.
In the Bitcoin white paper, its creator — Satoshi Nakamoto — set out the technical details for a ‘peer-to-peer electronic cash system’ that would enable people to transact without the need for a central authority.
While you can read Cointelegraph’s guide on Bitcoin here, the preeminent cryptocurrency is run by a network of computers which validate and share an ongoing ledger of transactions that requires hash-based proof-of-work algorithms to prevent double spending.
These transactions are validated and then stored in blocks by miners. Each block is limited to holding 1 MB worth of data before they are added to the blockchain. When a miner unlocks a block, a certain amount of Bitcoin is brought into existence.
Here is where scaling has recently become a problem. As more people started using Bitcoin, there was a spike in the amount of transactions. The network became congested due to the volume that needed to be validated, which caused transaction fees to rise. Simply put, it was becoming slower and more expensive to use Bitcoin for transactions.
As the graph below illustrates, fees gradually increased into 2017 onwards: