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*obligatory not financial advice*
What is Bitcoin Cash?
Bitcoin Cash, or BCH, is a fork of Bitcoin. This means that they used to be one and the same blockchain until some miners decided to make some changes to code that many other miners didn't implement which caused to the two groups of miners to split the network into two different blockchains. This change that the Bitcoin Cash crowd wanted was to increase the block size of Bitcoin which would have made it possible to make transactions faster and cheaper.
Bitcoin Cash was founded because the original Bitcoin is very slow and has insane transaction fees. You often have to wait several minutes for a transaction to be processed and several more to have enough confirmations to be really safe and you can pay transaction fees that are in the double digits. This makes Bitcoin unsuitable as an alternative to cash. Some believed that increasing the blocksize would solve this problems and indeed currently Bitcoin Cash is the better payment method.
Why did some miners oppose the bigger blocksize?
The reason why the increased blocksize was so controversial that it ended up splitting the entire community was that many people opposed the idea because bigger blocks can be bad for decentralization. All miners need to store the entire blockchain somewhere on their device, the BTC blockchain is currently more than 300 GB big and with each block it grows 1 MB. The Bitcoin Cash has bigger blocks and grows up to 32 MB per new block. This makes it increasingly harder to mine on your own over time. This is why the classical Bitcoin crowd kept their 1 MB big blocks and decided to make scale the network with second layer solutions like the Lightning Network.
Is BCH any good?
Bitcoin Cash is faster and cheaper to use than Bitcoin. However, there are countless other cryptocurrencies that are even faster and cheaper than BCH. Litecoin, Dash, Nano, XRP, Stellar, etc. The list is sheer endless. Bitcoin can afford to be slower and more expansive than its competition because now it is mostly seen as digital gold and not digital cash, also Bitcoin has some sort of brand awareness, for many people it is the only cryptocurrency they know. Bitcoin Cash doesn't have any of that and has underperformed BTC for a long time now. In fact it even its name sounds like it’s a cheap rip off of Bitcoin which could make it unattractive for serious investors. Honestly I don't think that BCH will ever reach its all-time high again and I think it would be bad long term investment, if anything it would only work for short term trading.
