Bitcoin Cash (BCH): a complete guide to the coin and its mining

Bitcoin Cash is a separate proof of work network that split off from Bitcoin on 1 August 2017 at a height of roughly 478,500 blocks. The reason was the scaling dispute: one part of the community chose to move the signature out of the transaction with SegWit, the other insisted on enlarging the block itself. It was the second group that launched the new chain with a limit of 8 megabytes instead of one.

Technically BCH inherited everything essential from Bitcoin: the SHA-256 algorithm, the 10 minute target block time, the emission cap of 21 million coins and the same halving schedule. The differences piled up elsewhere: the way difficulty is adjusted, the block size limit, the set of script operations and the address format. That is why BCH is mined with the same hardware as Bitcoin, while the economics of its block are its own.

For a hardware owner this means something simple: choosing between BCH and BTC is not a matter of buying a different machine, it is a matter of switching pools. At the end of July 2026 the network hashrate held around 3.3 exahashes per second, that is roughly 0.37 percent of total SHA-256 power. Profitability on one and the same ASIC hovers around parity with Bitcoin and on any given day lands a few percent above or below it.

The page is built as a reference work: network parameters, the history of splits and upgrades, a ranking of current ASICs from our catalogue, pools, wallets, the economics of mining and a separate look at the figures that large aggregators and calculators still publish in outdated form.

• 2017Fork from Bitcoin on 1 August. Bitmain described the hard fork concept in June, the first implementation came from the Bitcoin ABC client, and Roger Ver was among the public backers. The block limit was raised to 8 MB and an emergency difficulty adjustment mechanism, EDA, was added.
• 2017The upgrade of 13 November: EDA was replaced by the cw-144 algorithm, which computed difficulty over a sliding window of 144 blocks. The emergency mechanism produced swings that were too sharp and led to uneven coin issuance.
• 2018The Monolith upgrade of 15 May: the block limit was raised to 32 MB and part of the previously disabled script language operations came back.
• 2018The Magnetic Anomaly upgrade of 15 November: the OP_CHECKDATASIG operation and canonical transaction ordering inside the block were added. Those who disagreed left for a separate chain, Bitcoin SV, led by Craig Wright and Calvin Ayre. By 23 November the exchanges had fixed the BCH ticker to the chain that continued the ABC line.
• 2019Two upgrades: Great Wall on 15 May added Schnorr signatures and recovery of funds from SegWit addresses, Graviton on 15 November enabled Schnorr multisignatures and the MINIMALDATA rule.
• 2020The Phonon upgrade of 15 May: the SigOps system was replaced by SigChecks and the OP_REVERSEBYTES operation was added. On 8 April the first halving took place at block 630,000 and the reward dropped from 12.5 to 6.25 BCH.
• 2020The Axion upgrade of 15 November: ASERT (aserti3-2d) was enabled and difficulty began to be recalculated at every block. The same day brought a split: the Bitcoin ABC client demanded that 8 percent of the reward go to a development fund, and about 82 percent of miners backed BCHN. The ABC chain stayed in the minority under the name BCHA.
• 2021On 2 July the BCHA chain was renamed eCash with the XEC ticker: two decimal places instead of eight, a redenomination of one to a million and the Avalanche consensus layer. Bitcoin ABC moved on to a separate project for good, and Bitcoin Cash Node remained the reference client of BCH.
• 2023The upgrade of 15 May: CashTokens were added to the protocol, that is native fungible tokens and non fungible units with no external layers. The P2SH32 format appeared at the same time, along with limits on transaction version and minimum size.
• 2024The second halving in early April at block 840,000: the reward fell from 6.25 to 3.125 BCH. Because the chain sits higher, it came roughly two weeks before the Bitcoin halving.
• 2024The upgrade of 15 May: the adaptive block limit algorithm ABLA was enabled. The hard constant of 32 MB turned into a floor above which the ceiling grows and shrinks on its own, following actual network load.
• 2025The upgrade of 15 May: CHIP-2021-05 VM Limits and CHIP-2024-07 BigInt were activated. The first reworked the limits of the virtual machine, the second removed the cap on number length in scripts, which cut contract size sharply.
• 2026The upgrade of 15 May: four proposals at once. Loops added the bounded OP_BEGIN and OP_UNTIL, Functions introduced OP_DEFINE and OP_INVOKE, Bitwise brought back bitwise operations and shifts, P2S standardised pay to script and raised the token binding field to 128 bytes. The reference implementation is Bitcoin Cash Node version 29.

The accounting model of Bitcoin Cash is the same as in Bitcoin: the network stores no account balances, only a list of unspent outputs. A transaction points at previous outputs, spends them and creates new ones, and the right to spend is proven by a signature. The sum of all unspent outputs is the coin supply.

Transactions wait in a shared pool and miners assemble a block out of them. The fundamental difference here is that the block limit is not a constant: since May 2024 it is computed by the ABLA algorithm, starting from a floor of 32 megabytes and following actual load. With real traffic of about sixteen thousand transactions a day, blocks are filled to fractions of a percent of the ceiling, so there is practically no competition for block space and fees stay at fractions of a cent.

A block that has been found is verified by every node independently: signatures, the absence of double spends, the correctness of the reward, whether the hash meets the current target. Canonical transaction ordering, introduced in 2018, is checked as well: transactions inside a block must follow a strictly defined sequence, which makes parallel verification of large blocks easier.

It is worth understanding separately that difficulty lives differently here. Bitcoin waits 2,016 blocks and corrects the target once every two weeks, while Bitcoin Cash recalculates it at every block by an exponential formula with a half life of 48 hours. That is ASERT.

1. The wallet signs a transactionThe key owner builds a transfer to a CashAddr address and signs it. The private key never goes out onto the network.
2. The transaction spreads across nodesEvery node checks it against its own rules and puts it into its own waiting pool. At the current load the wait is almost always short.
3. The pool assembles a block templateThe pool operator picks transactions and hands work out to the connected machines. The upper bound on block size comes from the current ABLA value.
4. The ASIC grinds through hashesThe hardware changes service fields of the header and computes double SHA-256 until the result falls below the target value. The machines are the same ones used on Bitcoin.
5. The block is publishedThe first transaction of the block creates the reward: a subsidy of 3.125 BCH plus fees, which today add fractions of a percent on top.
6. Nodes accept the blockAbout 455 reachable nodes verify it independently, and most of them run the Bitcoin Cash Node client.
7. Difficulty is recalculated at onceASERT compares the actual block time with the expected one and corrects the target immediately, without waiting for the end of a period. The response half life is 48 hours.

SHA-256 is used in Bitcoin Cash exactly as it is in Bitcoin: the function is computed twice over a block header of 80 bytes, and the miner tries service fields until the hash falls below the target. Nothing was changed in the function itself at the fork, so all hardware is fully compatible and moves between the networks by changing the pool address.

The function needs no memory and consists of simple logic operations, so it is easy to freeze into silicon. That is exactly why ASICs pushed graphics cards out even before Bitcoin Cash appeared. A modern machine delivers hundreds of terahashes at an efficiency of about 10 joules per terahash, while a graphics card works at the level of tens of megahashes: the gap is measured in thousands of times.

Mining BCH on a graphics card or a processor makes no sense at any tariff. It is exactly the same algorithm as Bitcoin and the same hopeless competition with industrial hardware. Any service that promises otherwise is selling a cloud contract or doing its sums with numbers that do not exist.

AsicBoost works here too: the trick saves part of the computation by reusing the intermediate state of the function, iterating over bits of the header version field. The open variant is described in BIP-320 and looks the same to the pool in both networks, so a machine with such firmware keeps its gain on Bitcoin Cash as well.

The strengths are the same: simple verification, a mature component base, a huge installed fleet and full interchangeability with the Bitcoin market. The weakness is specific to BCH: its share of total SHA-256 power is under half a percent, so the network is protected not by its own hashrate but by the fact that the hardware is mostly busy with another chain and has to be pulled away from it.

Full description of the SHA-256 algorithm →

The emission schedule is inherited from Bitcoin unchanged: a cap of 21,000,000 BCH, a halving every 210,000 blocks and the last coins around the year 2140. At the end of July 2026 about 20.05 million BCH were in circulation, that is roughly 95.5 percent of the cap.

The stages already passed: 12.5 BCH from the fork of 2017, 6.25 BCH from 8 April 2020 (block 630,000) and 3.125 BCH since early April 2024 (block 840,000). The next halving is tied to block 1,050,000 and will cut the subsidy to 1.5625 BCH. On 31 July 2026, at a height of about 962,070, roughly 87,900 blocks were left, with 2028 as the expected year.

An important detail that almost every calendar gets wrong: the BCH chain is higher than the BTC chain. In the first months after the fork the EDA emergency mechanism dropped difficulty hard and blocks were found faster than planned. The gap of about fifteen hundred blocks has survived to this day, which is why a Bitcoin Cash halving arrives roughly two weeks before the Bitcoin one every time, rather than on the same day.

Annual issuance at the current reward is about 164,000 BCH, so supply inflation stays at roughly 0.8 percent a year. There is no coin burning in the protocol and no development fund deduction either: the attempt to introduce one in 2020 is exactly what led to the split, after which the network was left with no mandatory tax on the reward.

Fees as a source of miner income are practically absent here. At an average fee of about half a cent and some sixteen thousand transactions a day, the whole network collects tens of dollars a day, while the subsidy at a price of about 215 dollars yields on the order of 96,000 dollars a day. The share of fees in the reward comes out at around a tenth of a percent, an order of magnitude less than in Bitcoin, where it has itself fallen below one percent.

The full table of SHA-256 models from our catalogue, sorted by efficiency: Bitcoin Cash runs on exactly the same fleet of machines as Bitcoin, and no separate hardware for BCH exists.

Browse miners in the catalogue →

The ranking is built on real efficiency from the catalogue, not on popularity. The payback thresholds are computed from revenue of about 30 dollars per petahash a day, which follows from the reward of 3.125 BCH, a price of about 215 dollars and a network hashrate of 3.25 EH/s at the end of July 2026.

Firmware does not distinguish between networks: the machine computes the same SHA-256, and where the result goes is decided by the pool line in the settings. So everything that applies to a fleet on Bitcoin applies here without reservations.

The stock Bitmain build lets you start the machine and pick one of the preset modes, but it does not let you tune voltage and frequency per board. There is no way to bring a specific unit to its own optimum that way: chips differ even within one batch.

Third party builds solve that. With HashCore Toolkit, supported Antminer models of the S19 and S21 series receive firmware with manual per chain tuning of frequencies and voltages, automatic mode selection and telemetry from every hash board. The developer fee is 2.8 percent.

The key mode of such builds is AsicBoost. It saves part of the SHA-256 work by reusing the intermediate state of the function: bits of the header version field are iterated over, not just the nonce. The open variant is described in BIP-320, and on Bitcoin Cash it works the same way as on Bitcoin, because the two networks share the block header structure.

The economic case on BCH is even more direct than on Bitcoin. Fees here give about a tenth of a percent of the reward, so the whole income is the subsidy, and the only levers a miner has are the price of a kilowatt hour and joules per terahash. The limits are the same: reflashing voids the warranty and wrong voltages degrade the boards, so work with a backup of the factory build and raise the overclock gradually.

You can only start mining Bitcoin Cash with a SHA-256 ASIC. There are no separate machines for BCH and there never will be: it is the same algorithm. The minimum kit is the same as for Bitcoin: a machine, its stock power supply, a dedicated power line, wired internet and an account at a pool that supports BCH.

The first constraint is the electrics. A modern air cooled machine draws from 3.1 to 6.6 kW and requires a dedicated line with a breaker of 16 to 32 amps. A household socket will not hold such a load, and several machines on one breaker are a direct path to a fire. Water models drawing above 8 kW also need a ready loop with a heat exchanger.

The second constraint is noise and heat. Industrial air cooled models run at around 75 decibels and above, around the clock. You cannot put such a machine in living quarters, and that is a question not of comfort but of conflict with neighbours and with the rules. Water and immersion options are quieter but demand infrastructure.

What is specific to BCH shows up in the choice of pool. The list of sites working with this network is noticeably shorter than for Bitcoin, and part of the blocks are signed by unidentified participants or solo miners. The largest identifiable operator here is ViaBTC, with solo pools, Kryptex, Mining-Dutch, 2Miners, AntPool and Binance Pool alongside. Many of them can switch power between BTC and BCH automatically by current profitability, and for a fleet owner that is the main practical scenario.

In 2026 the home scenario only makes sense for learning on low power devices such as the Avalon Nano 3 at 140 W, or for using the heat, when the machine replaces the heating. As a source of income at a household tariff in Spain, a home ASIC on Bitcoin Cash is just as loss making as on Bitcoin.

Income is computed from four quantities: the hashrate of the machine, network difficulty, coin price and fees. For BCH the last term can safely be treated as zero: at an average fee of about half a cent the whole network collects tens of dollars a day against roughly 96,000 dollars of subsidy. Planning should start from the block reward alone.

A useful shorthand is revenue per petahash per day. From the reward of 3.125 BCH, a price of about 215 dollars and a network hashrate of 3.25 EH/s you get on the order of 30 dollars per PH/s a day. From there the arithmetic is direct: a machine of 270 TH/s brings about 8 dollars a day before electricity, and consumes some 87 kilowatt hours over that same day. Anything above roughly 0.09 dollars per kilowatt hour takes the whole revenue.

The main question in practice sounds different: what is more profitable on the same hardware. The answer at the end of July 2026 is honest and boring, about the same. The BCH share of total SHA-256 hashrate is around 0.37 percent, while the ratio of BCH to BTC prices is around 0.34 percent, which means mining Bitcoin that day was roughly 2 percent better. The gap keeps wandering around zero in both directions, because any deviation pulls part of the power into the more profitable network and restores parity.

Two conclusions follow. First: do not expect BCH to add to your yield, it is not built into the way the market works. Second: switching carries risks that Bitcoin does not have. The BCH market is thinner, daily turnover is measured in a hundred and something million dollars against tens of billions for BTC, so selling a large haul moves the price more visibly.

Open the profitability calculator →

The main beginner trap here is not the choice of wallet but the address format. Bitcoin Cash and Bitcoin use one and the same legacy Base58 format, so a BTC address looks indistinguishable from an old BCH address. CashAddr with the bitcoincash prefix was introduced precisely to remove that confusion: it matches no Bitcoin format at all. Send and receive only in it.

For a miner the rule is the same as everywhere: the address the pool sends payouts to must belong to you. A hardware wallet plus a seed phrase written down offline closes the risk of an exchange account freeze for sensible money. If you plan to work with CashTokens, check support in advance: not every wallet has it.

Bitcoin Cash trades on most large venues and as of 31 July 2026 sat in the third ten by capitalisation. Among those available in the EU, Kraken, Coinbase, Bitstamp and Bit2Me are used most often, and among global ones Binance, OKX, KuCoin and Bybit. The number of markets runs to a hundred and more.

Liquidity has to be judged soberly. Daily BCH turnover at the end of July 2026 came to some 100 to 150 million dollars by different aggregators, while for Bitcoin it is tens of billions. A difference of two orders of magnitude means that selling a large haul in one order moves the price, so it is better to exit in parts or across several venues.

We trade hardware, not coin. This page is a reference: pick the venue yourself, looking at its licence in your jurisdiction, the depth of the order book and the terms of cashing out to fiat. Check the withdrawal address character by character and never keep more on an exchange than you are ready to lose.

For buying hardware the rules are different: look at the warranty period, the presence of service in the EU and whether the machine ships with factory firmware. Second hand ASICs often arrive already reflashed, and restoring the stock build can be far from trivial.

The main stated use case is cheap payments. Here the network really does what it promises: an average fee of about half a cent, a confirmation in one block for pennies and no competition for block space. The flip side is that real demand is small: about sixteen thousand transactions a day against a limit designed for hundreds per second.

The second use case appeared in May 2023 together with CashTokens. These are fungible tokens and non fungible units built into the protocol, without layers or third party contracts. Stablecoins, crowdfunding and exchanges are built on them, and the fee of an operation stays below a cent.

The third vector is contracts. The upgrades of 2025 and 2026 made the script machine noticeably stronger: they removed the cap on number length, reworked the execution limits and added bounded loops, functions and bitwise operations. The applied result is already visible: in May 2026 vaults with a post quantum key protection scheme were launched on that base.

For a miner all of this matters only indirectly. While fees give fractions of a percent of the reward, applied activity has almost no effect on revenue. It will start to matter only after several halvings in a row squeeze the subsidy and transaction fees grow by orders of magnitude, which is not happening today.

Network security rests on the cost of an attack, and here Bitcoin Cash has a weak spot that is more honest to state plainly. An open estimate of an hour of attack on 31 July 2026 gave about 5,800 dollars for BCH against roughly 1.96 million dollars for Bitcoin, a gap of more than three hundred times. The reason lies not in the protocol but in the fact that the network holds under half a percent of SHA-256 power.

The mitigating factor is that the needed volume of power is almost nowhere to be rented: the share of BCH hashrate available on hashrate markets is close to zero by the same estimate. An attacker would have to either buy hardware or negotiate with large sites, which turns a technical task into an organisational one. Recall the general rule too: a 51 percent attack does not allow stealing coins that belong to others or creating extra ones, at most it reverses its own recent transactions.

The second layer of defence is nodes. At the end of July 2026 the network held about 455 reachable nodes, roughly two thirds of them running the reference client Bitcoin Cash Node. That is an order of magnitude fewer than on Bitcoin and means a heavier dependence on one codebase: BCH has no second build of comparable weight, of the kind that the alternative implementation became for Bitcoin in the dispute of 2025.

A historical feature of the network is that every major conflict was settled by a split rather than a compromise: 2018 gave Bitcoin SV, 2020 gave eCash. The flip side of that is positive: since 2021 upgrades have shipped on a predictable schedule, on 15 May every year, and activate without splitting the chain. That is worth taking into account when planning fleet operation over horizons longer than a year.

The block limit is called a fixed 32 megabytes. This has been out of date since 15 May 2024. From that date the ceiling is computed by the ABLA algorithm: 32 MB turned into a floor above which the limit grows under sustained load and falls when load drops. There is no upper constant in the protocol. The wording about a hard 32 MB is still published by major market aggregators.

The block reward is written as 6.25 BCH. That value was in force from April 2020 to early April 2024. Since block 840,000 the subsidy has been 3.125 BCH. The error shows up even in profitability calculators and overstates computed income exactly twofold.

Difficulty is described as a recalculation every 2,016 blocks. That is the Bitcoin rule. Since 15 November 2020 Bitcoin Cash uses ASERT (aserti3-2d): the target is recalculated at every block by an exponential formula with a half life of 172,800 seconds, that is 48 hours. Neither the EDA emergency mechanism from 2017 nor the cw-144 sliding window has been in the network for a long time.

Bitcoin ABC is called the reference client. Bitcoin ABC left BCH after the split of 15 November 2020 and in 2021 turned into a separate project, eCash, with the XEC ticker. The reference implementation of Bitcoin Cash today is Bitcoin Cash Node, which runs on about two thirds of reachable nodes, and the current branch is version 29.

The BCH and BTC halvings are presented as one event. The Bitcoin Cash chain sits about fifteen hundred blocks above the Bitcoin chain: the gap built up in the first months after the fork because of the emergency difficulty drop. That is why the halving of 2024 on BCH came in early April while BTC had its on 20 April. The next one, at block 1,050,000, will also arrive earlier.

Throughput is presented as an achieved result. Figures like hundreds of transactions per second are the ceiling of the limit, not a fact. Real load at the end of July 2026 was about 16,300 transactions a day, that is roughly 0.2 transactions per second and on the order of a hundred transactions per block. Blocks are filled to fractions of a percent of the limit.

The share of fees in the reward is judged by Bitcoin standards. At an average fee of about half a cent and the current transaction count, the whole network collects tens of dollars a day against roughly 96,000 dollars of subsidy. That is on the order of a tenth of a percent of the reward. Building a payback calculation on fees in this network is not possible at all.

Promises that BCH is more profitable to mine than BTC. On the same hardware yield hovers around parity. On 31 July 2026 the BCH share of total SHA-256 hashrate was about 0.37 percent against a price ratio of about 0.34 percent, meaning Bitcoin was roughly 2 percent better that day. Any deviation is closed quickly by a flow of power between the networks.

The price is compared with the high of 2017 as a benchmark. The all time high of about 3,786 dollars was set on 19 December 2017. On 31 July 2026 the price held in the region of 209 to 222 dollars, that is roughly 94 percent lower. Estimates of the yearly change in that period differed in sign between sources, so they are not worth relying on.

BCH, BSV and eCash are presented as one coin. These are three different chains. Bitcoin SV separated on 15 November 2018, eCash grew out of the minority BCHA chain after the split of 15 November 2020 and changed its name and ticker to XEC in July 2021. All they share with BCH is the block history up to the moment of the respective split.

A single person is named as the author of Bitcoin Cash. The network has no single creator. Bitmain described the hard fork concept in June 2017, the first implementation came from the Bitcoin ABC client, and Roger Ver acted as a public backer. Development today is carried out by several independent teams, and changes go through the CHIP proposal process.

The capabilities of the script language are described as of 2023. After CashTokens the network received three more upgrades. In May 2025 VM Limits and BigInt were activated, removing the cap on number length, and in May 2026 bounded loops, functions, bitwise operations and standardised pay to script were added. Reference works describing BCH as a network without developed contracts are two upgrade cycles behind.