Scalability has been a pervasive issue since the first day the blockchain was invented. For many years, developers have been trying to solve the issue of capacity. Since the blockchain is literally like a chain, things have to happen linearly. Which means that transactions have to wait for the ones before it to complete. They can’t happen simultaneously.
For that reason, there have been other coins and tokens created trying to find a way to speed up the process. One of the solutions was Bitcash which took advantage of a hard fork off of the Bitcoin blockchain and made the blocks bigger.
In this article, I will go over what that exactly means so you can see what the differences are between Bitcash and Bitcoin so you know which one is best for your needs.
Table of Contents
The trouble with Bitcoin
Besides the fact that the blockchain is linear, the block sizes are very small. Usually around 1mb of data per hash or block. And much of the data in each block is signature data that needs to be processed before the encryption takes place. This slows the process of verifying each transaction and closing the block so the next transaction can be encrypted and so on.
This is the biggest roadblock to scaling up and speeding up the process. There have been numerous suggestions to fix the problem, such as switching from a chain to a cluster so things can happen at the same time.
For now, there have been other blockchains being developed that aim to address the scalability issue.
What is Bitcash
You may have seen the term BCH to BTC rates on your exchange dashboard and wondered what it is. There is a coin, as we mentioned, called Bitcash that was formed in a hard fork off of the bitcoin blockchain.
The larger blocks at 8mb of data allows for faster encryption as the data can be processed more efficiently. This has helped speed up the process and has increased the scalability. People can exchange their BTC for BCH and use it to pay for things much faster than using bitcoin.
Many people like to have some of their Bitcoin converted to Bitcash for trading. Since things can happen quickly, sometimes a matter of an hour can have a dramatic effect on the value of the currency you are buying. Speed is very important when you are doing day trading, especially. Having an option like Bitcash is ideal to cut down the processing time of the transaction.
The downside to using Bitcash is that it is not yet adopted by the mainstream cryptocurrency traders. It may be hard to find vendors that accept it for instance.
As the scalability issue increases and it takes even longer to process transactions using Bitcoin, it may become more common for people to use Bitcash to pay for things.
No matter what comes next, it seems that good things are happening with both Bitcash and Bitcoin as time goes on.
Disclaimer:
This article has been contributed on behalf of Paxful. However, the information provided herein is not and is not intended to be, investment, financial, or other advice.
