Bitcoin Cash: upcoming Hard Fork will push transactions?

Bitcoin Cash is getting a big upgrade starting May 15. The fourth-largest cryptocurrency will be undergoing a “hard fork” that will quadruple the size of its blocks from eight megabytes to 32 megabytes and reactivate some operation codes that will let the digital currency’s blockchain be used for more than just Bitcoin Cash transactions.

The update has been dubbed Bitcoin Adjustable Blocksize Cap (Bitcoin ABC). It will change the underlying code that Bitcoin Cash is built upon to try and solve some of the major issues standing in the way of broader adoption of blockchain technology, the main one being scalability. Back when bitcoin first launch in 2009, it was only able to process around seven transactions a second. Bitcoin Cash originally forked away from bitcoin in August 2017 to try and make blockchain transactions quicker. Bitcoin ABC is a continuation of that goal and will try to cut transaction times down to 2.5 minutes, compared to bitcoin’s 10-minute block interval. Meaning this is bad.

A “hard fork” is a sort of software update to a crypto network that results in the creation of an entirely new blockchain network (and a new cryptocurrency to go along with it.)

Anyone who holds any amount of a coin that goes through a hard fork is entitled to receive a corresponding amount of the new coin. Therefore, any cryptocurrency that will experience a hard fork generally tends to see upward price movement in the days and weeks leading up to it.

The May fork is the result of a meeting of seven Bitcoin Cash developers that took place in London in November of 2017. The group, which is also known as Bitcoin ABC, said that functionality was their top priority for the BCH network.

A statement released by the group following the meeting reads: “our top priority for Bitcoin Cash is to keep improving it as a great form of money. We want to make it more reliable, more scalable, with low fees and ready for rapid growth. It should ‘just work,’ without complications or hassles. It should be ready for global adoption by mainstream users, and provide a solid foundation that businesses can rely on.”

When Bitcoin Cash was created, it was intended as a “better” alternative to the Bitcoin network. The main issue that BCH was intended to improve was scalability.

The Bitcoin network can only process an average of 3 or 4 transactions per second because of its small ‘block size’ (‘blocks’ are units of data in which transactions are confirmed.) Bitcoin’s blocks are limited to 1 megabyte each; as it stands now, Bitcoin Cash’s block size is limited to 8 megabytes, allowing the network to process as many as 61 transactions per second.

The larger block size also means that transactions on the Bitcoin Cash network are also generally less expensive, especially in times of high network traffic on the Bitcoin network.

Bitcoin Cash’s upcoming fork in May will further increase the Bitcoin Cash block size the 32 megabytes, which will significantly increase the number of transactions that the Bitcoin Cash network is capable of handling.

Members of the crypto community without strong ties to Bitcoin Cash are seeing the announcement as a way to manipulate the BCH market.

While the future of Bitcoin Cash may not be as clear as many of its supporters want it to be, it’s clear that the team of developers behind the network believe in their project, and are working hard to ensure its success.

BCH remains in its position as the most successful coin forked from the Bitcoin network yet.