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Bitcoin Cash is a hard fork from the Bitcoin blockchain, allowing for larger blocks of transaction data composing the chain of blocks (blockchain) of its electronic ledger.

What is Bitcoin Cash ?

Bitcoin Cash is a hard fork of Bitcoin. This means that Bitcoin's chain of processed transactions records (its blockchain) was forked to create a new blockchain (while Bitcoin's continued). This happened because Bitcoin Cash made changes to the rules governing its blockchain. Cryptocurrencies can be seen as consisting of a cryptocurrency, a secure ledger of its transactions and rules and methods for creating the ledger and to verify it, as transactions are processed, as well as to create the cryptocurrency.

One rule limits the size of the block of processed transactions records. A larger blocksize limit can help speed up the rate at which transactions are processed, as a potential bottleneck is the time taken to create (or discover) blocks and add them to the blockchain. If this needs to be done less often, then it can be seen that this bottleneck can be potentially alleviated. Bitcoin Cash was forked to do exactly this, increase the blocksize limit (or more specifically to make it adjustable, which it isn't with Bitcoin, and adjust it upwards, currently now to 32MB).

Is Bitcoin Cash still similar to Bitcoin ?

Like Bitcoin it is a peer-to-peer payment system, where payment processing occurs in a distributed system based on the Internet. The underlying blockchain technology helps create a secure ledger of all transactions in the cryptocurrency.

As it forked, Bitcoin Cash was distributed to holders of Bitcoin and like Bitcoin, there is a limit on the total number of Bitcoin Cash which can be produced by mining and this limit for both is 21 million.

The ticker symbol for Bitcoin is BTC, while the ticker symbol for Bitcoin Cash is BCH. This is the symbol used when trading the cryptocurrencies on exchanges.

Bitcoin Cash ABC and Bitcoin Cash SV

In November 2018, Bitcoin Cash was forked into two different cryptocurrencies, namely Bitcoin Cash ABC (Adjustable Blocksize Cap) and Bitcoin Cash SV (Satoshi Vision). These are rival competing implementations which have different blocksize limits. The symbol BCH is still being used, but as BCHABC and BCHSV.

Does the trader trade with the cryptocurrency ?

CFD trading and spread betting allows the trader to speculate on the price of the cryptocurrency on exchanges, but without owning it. This means that the trader does not need a wallet to store it (as they do not own it) and can go long and short. Spread betting is also available in the UK at some brokers.