On August 1, Bitcoin Cash was created as a result of a hard fork from the Bitcoin blockchain. Everyone who owned BTC at the time of the fork received the same amount of BCH, and the controversial coin has become the fourth largest cryptocurrency in the world with a market cap of approximately $26 billion. Bitcoin Cash has been performing very well recently, and outclassed the rest of the crypto top 10 by a significant margin – BCH is up by 101% in the last 7 days.
Is the news of the upcoming Bitcoin Cash hard fork fueling a part of the BCH buying activity? It is certainly possible, as many people associate the phrase “hard fork” with “free” tokens. Not every hard fork creates a new cryptocurrency however, and you’ll be sorely disappointed if you bought BCH in order to secure coins of a new cryptocurrency. The BCH hard fork scheduled for May 15 will change Bitcoin Cash’s consensus rules, but there will be no new cryptocurrency as a result.
As we all know, Bitcoin Cash came into existence because of the heavily contested Bitcoin scaling debate. The side that is now advocating for BCH is saying that BTC will never be able to scale properly as long as its maximum block size remains limited to 1 megabyte. Bitcoin Cash claims to greatly improve scalability with its 8 megabyte block size limit, while those who advocate for the original Bitcoin are leaning on second layer solutions such as the Lightning Network.
If the May 15 fork is successful, Bitcoin Cash will increase its maximum block size even further to 32 megabytes. This seems to be a future-proofing move, as the average Bitcoin Cash block size never came close to exceeding the 8 mb limit and only peaked at the 4.7 mb mark for a brief period in mid-January according to Bitinfocharts.