What is bitcoin cash? All you need to know about the cryptocurrency

BITCOIN CASH has surged in value over the past day or two, its market capitalisation increasing by $4.5billion since yesterday morning. But what is Bitcoin Cash and how is it different to bitcoin?

What is bitcoin cash?
Bitcoin cash (BCH) was established in August 2017 as a hard fork of bitcoin - the world’s biggest and best-known cryptocurrency.

Created by miners after disagreements within the bitcoin community over limiting the number of transactions, bitcoin cash aims to provide a fast, cheap way of sending money across the globe.

The crypto’s website reads: “Bitcoin cash brings sound money to the world, fulfilling the original promise of Bitcoin as ‘peer-to-peer electronic cash’.

“Merchants and users are empowered with low fees and reliable confirmations.

“The future shines brightly with unrestricted growth, global adoption, permissionless innovation, and decentralised development.”

While bitcoin cash is a lot like its parent crypto, there are a number of key differences.

These include an increased block size and no SegWit integration - the controversial upgrade that was added to bitcoin to enable more transactions to be processed.

Bitcoin.com CEO Roger Ver, who is often described as the ‘Bitcoin Jesus', is confident bitcoin cash is more “usable” than bitcoin.

Speaking to CNBC, Mr Ver said: “Bitcoin cash has all the characteristics that attracted me to bitcoin in the first place.

“And those characteristics are it’s fast, it’s cheap to use and reliable. And bitcoin core and their development team have intentionally made bitcoin more slow, expensive to use and unreliable.

“So if you have two versions of bitcoin: one that’s fast cheap and reliable and one that’s slow, expensive to use and unreliable, you don’t have to be a rocket scientist to figure out which one of those two versions of bitcoin will be most usable. And it’s clearly bitcoin cash.”

What is bitcoin cash worth?
Like many other cryptocurrencies, bitcoin cash has storm in value over the past six months.

Bitcoin cash’s price peaked on December 20 last year, when it reached $4,355 and though it has since dropped to just under $1,300, it is still the fourth biggest crypto on the market, according to CoinMarketCap.

The digital asset’s market capitalisation now sits at $21.8billion - down from its all time high of $73.5billion.