Transactions can take several minutes or more to process. As the network of bitcoin users has grown, waiting times have become longer because there are more transactions to process without a change in the underlying technology that processes them.
Ongoing debates around bitcoin’s technology have been concerned with this central problem of scaling and increasing the speed of the transaction verification process. Developers and cryptocurrency miners have come up with two major solutions to this problem.
The first involves making the amount of data that needs to be verified in each block smaller, thus creating transactions that are faster and cheaper, while the second requires making the blocks of data bigger, so that more information can be processed at one time. Bitcoin Cash (BCH) developed out of these solutions as a result of a Bitcoin hard fork occurring in August 2017. Bitcoin Cash was created to accommodate a larger block size compared to Bitcoin, allowing more transactions into a single block, Bitcoin cash ABC is called Bitcoin cash now.
