Bitcoin cash is a “fork” of Bitcoin. A fork occurs when a group of a cryptocurrency’s network participants want to run the network in a different way. Therefore, this group agree to start implementing their own technology to the blockchain at a certain point and create another, diverging blockchain. The two blockchains share a history until the point of the fork.

After the bitcoin cash fork, everyone received an amount of bitcoin cash tokens equivalent to the amount of bitcoin tokens they held at the time of the fork (e.g. if you held 2.5 bitcoin (BTC), after the fork you would have 2.5 BTC and 2.5 bitcoin cash (BCH).

There are two types of forks – a hard fork and a soft fork. A soft fork does not usually generate a new cryptocurrency and is akin to a “software upgrade” of the blockchain’s technology. Bitcoin cash was created as a result of the hard fork in August 2017. On the bitcoin cash fork of the blockchain, the transaction block sizes were increased from 1mb to 8mb in an effort to improve scalability.

The bitcoin cash fork was only supported by a small part of the bitcoin community. It is now regarded by most of the community as a failure due to centralisation of network participants, and therefore each bitcoin cash is valued at a much lower price than each bitcoin.
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