Bitcoin Cash Hard Fork Officially Announced for August 1
Bitcoin Cash is officially announced as a planned hard fork for August 1, creating an alternative Bitcoin with larger block sizes.
On July 21, 2017, Bitcoin Cash was officially announced as a planned hard fork of Bitcoin scheduled for August 1. The project was led by individuals and organizations who opposed SegWit and preferred direct block size increases as Bitcoin's scaling solution. Bitcoin Cash would fork from Bitcoin at block 478,558, creating a separate blockchain with an 8MB block size limit compared to Bitcoin's 1MB limit (effective 4MB with SegWit).
The announcement came just as SegWit was locking in for activation on Bitcoin, demonstrating that the big block faction had decided to create their own version of Bitcoin rather than accept SegWit as Bitcoin's scaling path.
The Bitcoin Cash announcement represented both a compromise and an escalation in Bitcoin's scaling debate. On one hand, creating a separate chain through a hard fork avoided a contentious fight over Bitcoin's ticker symbol and allowed both visions to coexist. Users would receive an equal amount of Bitcoin Cash for each Bitcoin they held at the fork snapshot, effectively receiving free coins on the new chain.
On the other hand, the fork raised concerns about network splits, confusion among users about which Bitcoin was 'real,' and potential security issues if hashpower divided between the chains. Prominent supporters of Bitcoin Cash included Roger Ver, Jihan Wu of Bitmain, and several Chinese mining pools. The announcement clarified that even with SegWit activating on Bitcoin, the ideological divide over scaling philosophy remained deep enough that a faction was willing to create and support an entirely separate version of Bitcoin rather than accept SegWit as the path forward.