Should i bitcoin cash

What Is Bitcoin Cash?

Bitcoin Cash is a hard fork from the original Bitcoin blockchain. This split occurred on August 1, 2017.

If you're new to cryptocurrency investing, a hard fork is essentially a split from the original blockchain. Think of it like the Catholic Church - if you go back in time, there were multiple "hard forks" along the way. Some of the biggest include Protestantism splitting from Catholicism. This is very similar.

Both Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash use the same algorithm (i.e. Bible), but they have different ways of interpreting it. Once they split, Bitcoin Cash uses its protocol, while Bitcoin uses it's protocol.

How Bitcoin Cash Is Different

In technical terms, Bitcoin Cash wanted larger block sizes than Bitcoin - they increased the block size to 8MB. However, all else is pretty much the same.

The last common block of Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash was Block 478558. At that split, any owners of Bitcoin (on the blockchain) also received an equal value of Bitcoin Cash. That's where the surprise came from this morning. Any holders of Bitcoin at that split received Bitcoin Cash.

But that Bitcoin Cash wasn't easily available to non-tech savvy investors, until today when Coinbase put Bitcoin Cash onto it's wallet publicly.

Bitcoin Cash is much cheaper than Bitcoin. Currently, it's about 75% cheaper, however, the price has skyrocketed lately: