Bitcoin Cash is a cryptocurrency that is a fork of Bitcoin. Bitcoin Cash is a spin-off or altcoin that was created in 2017.
Two subsequent chain splits of Bitcoin Cash have occurred after the original 2017 split from Bitcoin. In 2018, Bitcoin Cash split into two cryptocurrencies: Bitcoin Cash and Bitcoin SV.
The need to accommodate an increasing count of transactions per second contributed to a push by some in the community to create a hard fork to increase the block size limit. This push came to a head in July 2017 when some members of the bitcoin community including Roger Ver felt that adopting BIP 91 without increasing the block-size limit favored people who wanted to treat bitcoin as a digital investment rather than as a transactional currency. Bitcoin Cash supporters, compared to Bitcoin, were more committed to a medium of exchange function. This push by some to increase the block size met a resistance. Since its inception up to July 2017, Bitcoin users had maintained a common set of rules for the cryptocurrency. Eventually, a group of bitcoin activists, investors, entrepreneurs, developers, and largely China-based miners were unhappy with Bitcoin's proposed SegWit improvement plans meant to increase capacity and pushed forward alternative plans for a split which created Bitcoin Cash. Segwit controversially would later enable second layer solutions on bitcoin such as the Lightning Network, and this controversy led to the split that created Bitcoin Cash. The proposed split included a plan to increase the number of transactions its LEDGER can process by increasing the block size limit to eight megabytes.
The would-be hard fork with an expanded block size limit was described by hardware manufacturer Bitmain in June 2017 as a "contingency plan" should the Bitcoin community decide to fork implementing SegWit; the first implementation of the software was proposed under the name Bitcoin ABC at a conference that month. In July 2017, the Bitcoin Cash name was proposed by mining pool ViaBTC. The change, called a fork, took effect on 1 August 2017. As a result, the bitcoin ledger called the blockchain and the cryptocurrency split in two.
