Question for the Bitcoin Community - As part of my college course I am currently enrolled in a module much of which is centered around the history of bitcoin . I am completely new to the world Bitcoin and still finding my feet in terms of understanding everything so please go easy on my below post in terms of things that may be wrong or dont fit with your views on bitcoin . As part of the course we are currently looking at the difference between bitcoin and bitcoin cash - if you've a few minutes read the below and let me know whats right and wrong and what else I need to know about the split in the community in terms of parties working in both communities , issues and solutions to both parties ideas.

I appreciate any feedback you could give.

Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash August 2017 we saw the creation of a hard fork from Bitcoin’s original blockchain ledger. The fork was created as a result of a debate that caused a split into the bitcoin community. The debate was centered around the issue of scalability in the bitcoin blockchain . The following outlines below what I believe to be the arguments presented by both users of Bitcoin and Bitcoin cash on how best to solve the scalability issue . Open to any corrections of details people may have on either sides arguments .

The Issue of Scalability.

Under satoshis original whitepaper for Bitcoin we know that individual’s transactions are grouped together to form blocks. Each block has its own blockhash made up of four key components 1) The Hash of the previous block 2) A time stamp of the new block 3) The merkle tree root hash which is the method by which transaction are bundled together from the transaction slush pool with the first transaction hash in the bunch being the coinbase of that bundle . 4) Nonce – This is the puzzle minors need to solve in order to complete the block . To solve the puzzle requires brut computing force so minors must expend computer processing power to find the value randomly that satisfies the puzzle. Upon finding the value the blocks hash is then complete and at this point the block is added to the blockchain .

When a block is added to the blockchain a miner ie the person whos cpu solved the nonce to create the block is rewarded in two ways – 1stly with the issue of newly minted bitcoin and 2ndly with all the transaction fees that people wishing to send bitcoin transactions to attach to their transactions .

The issue with scalability surrounding the blockchain prior to August 2017 was that each block could had a maximum blocksize of 1MB which allowed for roughly 250,000 transaction per day to be processed . The issue was that as more and more people began to use the Bitcoin network it began to run slower as users who were unwilling to pay higher fees had to wait longer for their transactions to be added from the slush to a block and confirmed . How to solve this issue of scalability in the blockchain is what ultimately lead to the forking of the blockchain in August 2017 and the creation of Bitcoin Cash .

Bitcoins solution to scalability – Bitcoins solution to its scalability issue include the creation of both Segregated Witness ( Segwit ) and lightning protocols. Segwit was introduced to increase the blockchain blocksize from 1mb to a maximum of 4mb with the current protocol allowing for blocks to be 2mbs in size . Segwit also allowed for the creation of layered networks on the bitcoin protocol that will ultimately lead into the adoption of the lightning network .

The lightning network is a way in which payments can be chained together outside of the blockchain. It works by allowing participants to transactions interact only twice with the blockchain ledger , once to open and once to close a set of transaction . In-between the opening and closing participants enforce digital IOUs against one another with either party having the option to end the current transaction string of IOUs and cash out for the balancing amount .

Bitcoin Cash’s Solution to scalability . Bitcoin Cash creators changed bitcoins protocol such that the block size was increased from 1Mb to 8MB thus allowing for more transactions to be confirmed in each block helping the network to run quicker .

If you owned Bitcoin prior to August 1st 2017 you also own Bitcoin Cash ( I Think) . Because the chains forked I think so do the public and private key address in the underlying system which means if you sign into a wallet that supports bitcoin cash you’ll find some which at the time I wrote this was roughly 952 USD per coin . Is this correct?

Thanks for all your feedback.