Bitcoin Cash is a fork of the Bitcoin chain. Here are some facts:
- Anyone that had Bitcoin prior to the August 1st fork has Bitcoin Cash, in same amounts as their Bitcoin holding at the 1st of August. (Though, if you had your bitcoins on an exchange/bank/site not caring about Bitcoin Cash - or worse, if you had bitcoins on an exchange/bank/site that chooses to steal the BCC, then it's probably lost).
- The Bitcoin Cash has a real value, as it can be sold for fiat or Bitcoin on some exchanges (including shapeshift.io).
- The transaction format has been extended with strong signatures, this gives a two-way replay barrier. An ordinary bitcoin transaction sent after the fork is not valid on the Bitcoin Cash chain, and a Bitcoin Cash transaction is not valid on the Bitcoin network. This basically means that your Bitcoin Cash coins and Bitcoin coins are completely separate entities. (In a fork without any replay barriers most transactions will be valid at both chains, i.e. it would be difficult to send BTC without also sending BCC and vice-versa. The user has to go through extra hoops to make sure to split the coins).
- The strong signatures solves some issues, i.e. the notable quadratic hashing problem.
- Block size has been increased to 8 MB.
- I think it's intended that the blocks should come every tenth minute, like with Bitcoin, but now while the difficulty is getting adjusted the block discovery interval is much longer.
- You will need to use some wallet that supports Bitcoin Cash to actually spend it.
