Bitcoin Cash

By 2015, proposals such as Gavin Andresen’s BIP 101 had already tried to replace Bitcoin’s fixed 1 MB maximum with a growing limit. The proposal closed without adoption, and later camps disagreed over SegWit, off-chain scaling and larger base-layer blocks. Bitcoin Cash therefore has no honest single-founder story: Bitcoin ABC wrote the decisive UAHF software, miners such as ViaBTC produced blocks, and wallets, exchanges and users chose whether to recognize the new asset.

The new rules switched on at 12:20 UTC on 1 August 2017. They required the fork block to exceed 1 MB and introduced ForkID signatures so protected transactions would not replay on the other chain. Block 478,558 remained the last common entry; the first BCH-only block, 478,559, arrived at header time 17:59:21 UTC, 5 hours 39 minutes after activation.

BCH could borrow Bitcoin’s history, but not its hash power. The emergency difficulty adjustment could cut difficulty 20% after a long delay, allowing blocks to resume when miners left. Its step changes also made switching between SHA-256 chains attractive. A 144-block algorithm replaced it in November 2017, yet daily oscillation remained.

ASERT, activated in November 2020, made difficulty follow an exponential schedule around a reference point with a two-day half-life. This was an engineering answer to observed block-time instability. It did not reserve hash power for BCH: miners can still redirect compatible machines when relative rewards change.

In November 2018, Bitcoin ABC’s CTOR and CHECKDATASIG rules collided with the incompatible Bitcoin SV program associated with nChain and CoinGeek. The incompatible rules produced separate BCH and BSV networks. Exchanges had to pause flows because the competing networks lacked automatic replay separation. What had been one BCH market became BCH and BSV.

A different conflict arrived in 2020. BCHN forked the ABC code and removed its infrastructure-funding-plan logic. Bitcoin ABC later proposed that consensus send 8% of newly mined coins through a coinbase rule. The BCHN-compatible chain retained the BCH name without that rule; the ABC branch separated and was later renamed eCash. BCHN consequently became the implementation the official site recommends to miners and lists as common for exchanges and services.

CashTokens brought native fungible and non-fungible primitives in May 2023. A year later ABLA replaced a permanently fixed ceiling with a rule that can increase or decrease the maximum gradually as blocks fill, while retaining a 32 MB floor. It turns future capacity into a measurable consensus response, though larger blocks still demand more from nodes.

The May 2026 upgrade added pay-to-script, bounded loops, function operations and bitwise operations. These features extend what contracts can express; they also require wallets, indexers, exchanges and node software to follow the same rules. CHIPs organize that work, but they do not give holders votes. Their force comes from persuasion and voluntary adoption by the people who run and use the network.

BCH inherited pre-split outputs, so the corresponding private keys could control coins on the new ledger. New coins enter through a block subsidy that starts at 50 BCH and halves every 210,000 blocks, keeping scheduled issuance below 21 million BCH. MAX_MONEY is a separate amount-range check. Miners also collect fees, but nodes reject blocks that break their consensus rules.

Holding BCH does not confer a protocol governance ballot. The reviewed protocol has no issuing corporation or redemption mechanism; an LCX MiCA disclosure separately records no issuer-linked ownership, dividend, profit-sharing or redemption rights. It supplies the ability to satisfy scripts and transfer outputs. That narrow definition matters because the network’s most consequential decisions have repeatedly been made through software adoption—and, when agreement failed, through another fork.