Bitcoin Fork Bitcoin Bash Became a Necessity
Posted by HASSAAN MALIK
Although the world’s first decentralized cryptocurrency bitcoin is approved and applauded by many, there are several flaws associated with bitcoin that can’t be improved. Apart from the volatility, features of bitcoin such as its blocksize and its capability of dealing transactions are a few of the things that needed change. As bitcoin, a programmed cryptocurrency, couldn’t be modified, a hard fork became necessary. Consequently, after consensus, bitcoin cash was created in 2017.
Bitcoin’s inability to deal with the scalability problem didn’t go well with the crypto community. Bitcoin, a peer to peer payment system, is capable of handing at most only 7 transactions per second. At the same time, while the second-largest cryptocurrency by market cap, ethereum, allows 15 transactions per second, traditional payment services such as Visa are dealing 24,000 transactions per second.
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The massive gap between the number of transactions handled by Visa and bitcoin shows that bitcoin is significantly slower than Visa. So, in order to compete with Visa, an amendment became extremely necessary. That’s why bitcoin cash that had a blocksize of about 8 megabytes (MB) and the capability to accommodate 2 million transactions per day was created as a solution to bitcoin’s problem of scalability.
Bitcoin introduced over a decade ago initially had a blocksize of 1 MB worked fine because it was not very popular back then and the traffic back then handled by it was easily managed. But with time passing by, the volatile nature of bitcoin and potential of bitcoin became clear to a majority, especially after the bull run of 207 when bitcoin reached its all-time high (ATH).
Soon after the scalability problem got recognized among the crypto community, two groups were formed. While one of them addressed the scalability problem, the other one was of the view that bitcoin never designed to be a “cup of coffee” payment solution. However, due to the limitations of bitcoin, a solution to settle all was required.
Now as upgrading bitcoin block meant modifying and adjusting all the previous blocks on the network which was not feasible, bitcoin hard fork was the solution shortlisted which resulted in the creation of bitcoin cash. Although bitcoin cash is better than bitcoin in several aspects, it is not decentralized like bitcoin as three mining pools account for more than 51% of bitcoin cash mining.
