The much-vaunted cryptocurrency which spun-off from Bitcoin in a hard fork is celebrating its first anniversary today. Bitcoin cash started its journey on 1st August and shot up to the $800 level in a matter of minutes on that day. Currently, its value less than its starting price with a price of around $765 on Binance. Bitcoin cash was supposedly created to solve the problems associated with Bitcoin Core and its developers continually insist that it is the pure version of the coin according to the Satoshi Whitepaper. That of course, is contested by Bitcoin Core purists who maintain that BCH is simply a rebel offshoot with no value at all. There has been a constant war of words on this subject with the most prominent of the Bitcoin Cash cheerleaders being Roger Ver who even started his own website called Bitcoin.com which purports to continue solidifying the BCH brand. Speaking on the first anniversary that Bitcoin Cash launched, Alejandro de la Torre, the Vice President of Business Operations at BTC.com, said that the problem of scalability in transactions was solved by Bitcoin Cash when it increased the limit of its block-size.”Larger block-sizes give each block more space to include transactions, which drives down wait times and costs per transaction, making the blockchain fluid and more accessible.”Torre also said that Bitcoin Cash can handle transactions in large volumes at low-cost and high-speed. Currently, the block-size of Bitcoin Cash has been increased to 32MB, eliminating any chances of congestion of its network. He also cited the example of Venezuela saying that the estimation of the country’s inflation is currently more than 40,000%. In such countries, Bitcoin Cash can be utilized as an alternative payment method in place of fiat. Interestingly, Venezuela also came out with its own cryptocurrency, the Petro which is currently pegged to the country’s oil reserves. Another website which boosts the BCH brand, Coingeek, organized its own Bitcoin Rebirth party in London today where it invited all miners and proponents of the coin to a huge bash. Coingeek’s founder Calvin Ayre had this to say about the anniversary event.”The one-year anniversary of the rebirth of Bitcoin (now named Bitcoin BCH) is a great moment in the history of money. It’s also good time to remind everyone who wants Bitcoin to fulfil its original mandate of being a global electronic currency that a key piece of work must still be finished: we must complete the task of fully restoring the original Bitcoin protocol, and then locking it down so that future application development happens on top of this battled tested platform. This means it is also necessary to remove the artificial block size cap that was put on as a temporary measure shortly after Bitcoin first launched, and return to the original design of an unlimited block size. Ayre went on to say that making changes to the underlying protocol for perceived short-term gains will do nothing but lower stability and security and eventually kill the network entirely.”With the Bitcoin protocol locked, there will be a Cambrian explosion of innovation on top of the Bitcoin platform. Any mistakes made at a layer on top of the BCH protocol can be more easily discarded and will have no impact on the underlying platform’s ability to be money to the world”, he added. A year on from inception, Bitcoin Cash is well established with over 19 service agreements including those with Bitpay, Coinpayments, Coingate, Coindance and Viabtc. It is also a part of 14 different projects, namely, JoyStream, OpenBazaar, Counterparty among others and is available on no less than 41 exchanges. Recently, Roger Ver in a YouTube video published on the official channel of Bitcoin.com said that Cyprus has reached an adoption rate as high as 70% for Bitcoin Cash. Moreover, a Bitcoin Cash advocate from Cyprus also stated that the merchant count who will be adopting the coin will reach an impressive 4,000 by November 2018. Featured image from Shutterstock