August 1, 2019 marked the second year since the BTC chain broke into two. The date went down in history as the day BTC software engineers and its passionate community welcomed Bitcoin Cash to the crypto world.
Thanks to the milestone, you can now exchange Bitcoin Cash against various pairs in more than a dozen trading platforms. Now, before BTC came to be, a number of crypto trading companies, individual Bitcoiners, and developers felt that the original bitcoin developers centrally hindered the expansion of the currency. It is believed that the wrangles started when the size of the blockchain was found to be congested, forcing some users to opt for on-chain settlements.
But the main developers remained mum about the concerns raised and maintained the block size at only 1 MB. By 2017, bitcoin activities had congested the network with backlogs of transactions as the associated fees remained on the rise.
Prior to the execution of Segregated Witness on the bitcoin network, SHA-256 miners had forked at 2:14 pm. EST on August 1, 2017. The fork was initiated when the first Bitcoin Cash block (478599) was mined, with a capacity to hold 6,985 transactions and was 1.9 MBs in size.
BCH’s hash rate kicked off at 4% of the BTC network’s hash rate or 247 petahash per second (PTH/s). Just a day after the fork, BTC clinched the third highest market capitalization, elbowing out other established coins like litecoin. In the days that followed, the BTC developers further produced six “big blocks” of more than 1 MB.
But it is perhaps August 16 the date that would mark one of the most important dates in the calendar of Bitcoin Cash lovers; on this very day at around 8:00 am. EST, the first-ever 8 MB block was mined on BCH with an approximate block height of 479469, meant to process more than 37,000 transactions in a swoop. In the next two days, the cost of mining BTC was found to be 21% less compared to the mining Bitcoin core.
The Achievements So Far
To date, Bitcoin Cash developers have been able to establish several codes in the BTC chain. Back in 2017, the block size stood at 8 MB; however, after May 2018, the size was boosted to 32 MB, with even bigger sizes currently being tested across the network.
The BTC enthusiasts have not shied away from commemorating all the achievements so far…
This year’s two-year anniversary will be taking place in various cities around the world including Tokyo, San Antonio, Edinburgh, China, London, Houston, Thailand, Germany, Bangkok, among other cities. The anniversary, dubbed BCH Meetup, was graced by key industry stakeholders such as BRD CEO Adam Traidman, Edge Wallet CEO Paul Puey, and Bitcoin.com’s Roger Ver as well as top performances. One of the major meetups will take place in Tokyo at a place called V2 Tokyo (Roppongi) between 7:00 pm and 10:30 pm.
As parties around the world continue to celebrate the wide adoption of the electronic peer-to-peer cash transfer system, even greater achievements are being realized by the day. As of this day, the BCH network is able to handle more than 2.4 million transactions within 24 hours. By November 2018, a couple of 32 MB blocks had been mined, and each block processed cleared a backlog of transactions in the network in one sweep. Extra tests on the BTC network have proven that Bitcoin Cash is highly scalable, unlike Bitcoin core.
New Features
BTC engineers have also been keen on introducing a number of new exciting features. For instance, the old Satoshi opcodes have been re-configured, data-carrier-size has been boosted to 220 up from 80, and the Script OP Checkdatasig has also been operationalized.
The new features are meant to enhance efficiency in embedding data into the core chain, aid in decision-based transactions, support the concept of smart contracts, creating an oracle, as well as aid in decentralization.
But that was not all to be celebrated at the BTC meetup; Bitcoin Cash engineers also helped design the first privacy-centric tool for BCH called Cashshuffle. Since its launch, the solution has seen BCH worth millions of dollars shuffled on the Electron Cash wallet. The Bitcoin.com wallet is also expected to incorporate the Cashshuffle code in the near future to further enhance the mixing of Bitcoin Cash.
Apart from developing a shuffle code, the team has also implemented the standard operations of Schnorr signature on its main chain. The Schnorr signature is a concept developed by Claus Schnorr in collaboration with other developers to help with privacy and scaling issues in the currency’s chain.
Though not fully operational, the active part of the signature is currently helping create new transaction while reducing the transaction storage by roughly 4%.
Bitcoin Cash lovers all around the world indeed have a reason to celebrate the much that has been accomplished since August 2017. Moving forward, stakeholders will be keen on seeing BTC gain more traction like Bitcoin. Hopefully, the next anniversary celebration will be graced by even greater achievement for the BTC fanatics.