In the year 2017, Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash parted ways.

Today, the top ten crypto assets by market capitalisation are all positive.

Bitcoin (BTC) rose 1% to US$37,272 in the last 24 hours.

As you move down the list, you'll see that not all of the coins are increasing in value.

Bitcoin Cash, the 28th most valuable cryptocurrency, has remained unchanged in the last 24 hours, trading at US$277.

While every crypto trader knows what Bitcoin is, not everyone knows what Bitcoin Cash is.

The Motley Fool contacted Ray Brown, a market analyst at CoinSpot, an Australian cryptocurrency exchange, with this in mind.

What caused Bitcoin Cash to emerge?

First and foremost, we were curious as to how Bitcoin Cash came to be.

According to Brown,

While Bitcoin Cash resembles the original Bitcoin in certain ways, it is a completely separate cryptocurrency that was 'forked' from Bitcoin.

It was founded in 2017 by a portion of the Bitcoin community with the goal of exploiting Bitcoin's strong features while addressing some of its shortcomings, such as scalability.

Bitcoin Cash has gained traction and has established itself as a serious competitor to other cryptocurrencies. It hasn't, however, come close to reaching Bitcoin's level of popularity.

Why is scalability in cryptography being pushed so hard?

So, why did the Bitcoin community desire to improve the scalability of the world's first crypto?

Brown believes that:

Bitcoin was intended to be a digital currency when it was first developed. The processing of transactions became slower as more people invested. This is partly owing to the fact that the blocks are only 1MB in size, leaving little possibility for scalability. As a result, Bitcoin has evolved into more of a store of value than a convenient means of making daily transactions.

So, has Bitcoin Cash been successful in overcoming these flaws?

"Bitcoin Cash was created to address these constraints, and it has done so in part by incorporating a maximum block size of 32MB," according to Brown.

He then went on to say,

This speeds up transactions and expands the number of people who can use it simultaneously. Bitcoin Cash's developers say that it can process 200 transactions per second, compared to Bitcoin's average of seven. As a result, Bitcoin Cash's cost per transaction has fallen, while its scalability has improved.

In the year 2022, Bitcoin Cash outperformed Bitcoin.

Bitcoin Cash has underperformed Bitcoin in 2022, despite the lower cost per transaction and better scaling capability. BCH has dropped 38 percent in the New Year, while BTC has fallen 22 percent.

The Motley Fool quoted Brown as saying:

In 2022, the majority of altcoins have underperformed, including Bitcoin Cash. Since the huge cryptocurrency selloff in January 2022, however, many have begun to stabilise. The market cap of the industry was wiped out by the selloff, which totalled $1 trillion. In addition, Bitcoin and Ethereum have lost up to half of their value since their peak.

Because most altcoins are influenced by Bitcoin's movements, they suffered higher losses.

What are the considerations for cryptocurrency investors?

Finally, we asked Brown what factors crypto investors should consider before investing in one of the coins.

"Bitcoin Cash does not yet have the same level of consumer trust as Bitcoin, and as a result, it does not have nearly as many investors," he said. "As a result, Bitcoin Cash's value in a'real-world' scenario has decreased at the time of press."

"Although the market now shows Bitcoin to be more popular than Bitcoin Cash, you should always perform your own study to identify which crypto asset is suitable for you," Brown cautioned investors.

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