4

As I understood from Nakamoto's original bitcoin proposal, the bitcoin algorithm was designed in such a way that there would be a fixed total number of bitcoins and that bitcoin is designed for microtransactions. Therefore, once all of the mine-able bitcoin has been mined, no new bitcoins will appear in the system. As the value of bitcoin increases, people will simply trade smaller and smaller fractions of the original fixed number of bitcoins.

Is this true with Bitcoin Cash? Is the only difference between Bitcoin Cash and the original bitcoin a larger block size?

pepper
  • 141
  • 1
  • 3

2 Answers2

7

Is this true with Bitcoin Cash?

Yes, the same.

Is the only difference between Bitcoin Cash and the original bitcoin a larger block size?

There's one more difference: Bitcoin Cash uses BIP-143 to solve the quadratic hashing and to add replay protection. (BIP-143 is also enabled by SegWit on main chain.) (the formula is hashType | SIGHASH_FORKID (0x40) while it's hashType | SIGHASH_FORKID (0x40) | 79 << 8 (20,024) on Bitcoin Gold)

As @jnewbery said, transactions are now being signed differently, and there's an emergency difficulty adjustment algorithm that makes difficulty lower by 20%, if the blocks come too slow. (More info about it here)

UPDATE November 13 A hardfork has occured. EDA was disabled and a new difficulty adjustment algorithm (cw-144) came. Also the 3rd person malleability (a.k.a. transaction malleability) is fixed. More info: https://www.bitcoinabc.org/november or https://github.com/bitcoincashorg/spec/blob/master/nov-13-hardfork-spec.md

MCCCS
  • 10,206
  • 5
  • 27
  • 56
  • 2
    There are other differences. One important difference is that transactions must be signed using SIGHASH_FORKID. This was added as replay protection between Bitcoin Cash and Bitcoin. Another is that the difficulty retargeting algorithm has been changed. – jnewbery Aug 17 '17 at 18:38
3

Since it is a fork of Bitcoin, it has the same limit of 21 million coins

Christoph Winter
  • 137
  • 4
  • 3
    This is not true, and is a bad assumption. Because a hard fork allows you to change any of the protocol rules, there could easily be a hard fork that changes the 21 million coin limit. When it comes to a hard fork, every previous assumption is off the table. That's what makes it a hard fork. – Jestin Aug 27 '17 at 17:48
  • @Jestin Yes thats true. What I meant by this is because it was not changed by the fork, it inherits the previous limit from before the fork. – Christoph Winter Aug 28 '17 at 18:50
  • 3
    I know what you meant, but it could be confusing to someone. Any statement that says "Since it is a fork of Bitcoin, blahblahblah is true" is technically inaccurate. Sure, blahblahblah may be true, but not because it is a fork. Hard forks can do anything. Since this is a technical question and answer site, this answer is fairly misleading. I recommend editing this to state that although multiple protocol rules were changed, the 21 million limit was not one of them. – Jestin Aug 28 '17 at 18:57