All Bitcoin holders as of block 478558 were made owners of BCH. Those who opted for Bitcoin Cash had their bitcoins automatically turned into BCH, which was rather easy as their technologies are rather similar. The same goes for the number of coins in circulation which Bitcoin Cash shares with its progenitor – 21 million BCH, of which more than 17 million coins are in circulating supply as of April 2019. At the same time, the currency’s market cap stood at USD 5.1 billion at the same time, with historical high achieved in December 2017 when its value reached USD 59 billion.
Soon after its introduction, Bitcoin Cash became one of the top ten coins by market capitalization, ranking at number 4 as of April 2019. Buying BCH on cryptocurrency exchanges is a viable option as the currency enjoys fairly strong support on the platforms such as Bittrex, Coinbase and others.
Once acquired, Bitcoin Cash can be stored in a variety of wallets, including mobile, desktop, hardware and paper wallets. Most wallets are free to download and support sending, receiving, and storing funds, transaction insights and other functions.
Yet, this success came against a range of problems which the Bitcoin Cash initially faced, including:
- Being confused with Bitcoin since it shared a similar logo and had its origins in the same community. The term “bcash” which is sometimes used for it does not help its cause either.
- Being sometimes described as a “low-end” variant of the currency it forked from, particularly by the less experienced users. Yet, the Bitcoin Cash user community tries to help by pushing initiatives and lists of businesses that actually accept Bitcoin Cash as a means of payment.
- Centralization with Bitcoin Cash is seen as a more prominent issue compared to Bitcoin. Some commentators go as far as calling Bitcoin Cash “fiat money” based on its association with Bitmain which is described as the “central bank” of BCH.
- Finally, there is an issue of BCH mining. Investments in mining rigs can go just as high as in the case of Bitcoin which still promises to deliver higher rate of return on investments.