Should You Forget Bitcoin and Buy Bitcoin Cash Instead?

• Bitcoin Cash is up 30% for the year, astatine a clip erstwhile Bitcoin is inactive successful the red.

• Over the past 5 years, Bitcoin has decisively outperformed Bitcoin Cash.

• Long-term buy-and-hold investors should presumption Bitcoin Cash's show this twelvemonth arsenic a marketplace anomaly.

• 10 stocks we similar amended than Bitcoin ›

With marketplace bellwether Bitcoin (CRYPTO: BTC) down 4% for the year, it's nary astonishment that crypto investors person been scrambling for alternatives.

But it's been slim pickings successful 2025. Only a fistful of apical cryptocurrencies are successful the greenish for the year, and galore of them are comparatively chartless to investors. One of the astir promising of these is Bitcoin Cash (CRYPTO: BCH). It's up 30% for the year, and present ranks arsenic the 11th-largest cryptocurrency successful the world.

Is present the clip to rotate retired of Bitcoin and into Bitcoin Cash? Or is this precisely the benignant of short-term momentum-based determination that's bound to wreck your portfolio later?

As you mightiness person guessed from the name, Bitcoin Cash is simply a nonstop spinoff of Bitcoin. In the crypto and blockchain world, this is known arsenic a hard fork. This occurs erstwhile the blockchain of 1 cryptocurrency is divided into 2 antithetic pieces. From there, they spell their ain abstracted way.

Both Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash are governed by the aforesaid halfway algorithm, and some person a beingness circulating proviso of 21 cardinal coins. The lone existent quality is the size of each artifact connected their respective blockchains. Bitcoin Cash has larger artifact sizes, and that makes it much suitable for peer-to-peer transactions. Simply put, the larger the block, the much accusation it tin hold, and the faster the processing clip becomes.

Bitcoin Cash launched successful August 2017, and astatine the time, immoderate Bitcoin purists thought it represented a much close mentation of the imaginativeness outlined by Satoshi Nakamoto successful the archetypal Bitcoin whitepaper. The sanction of that insubstantial was "Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System."

Unlike Bitcoin -- which has ne'er truly been utilized arsenic physics currency astatine standard -- Bitcoin Cash was expected to beryllium overmuch much utilitarian. You were really expected to wage for things with your Bitcoin, alternatively than conscionable hoard it.

The quality betwixt Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash tin beryllium defined by however you presumption Bitcoin arsenic a integer currency. Should it chiefly beryllium a "store of value," oregon should it chiefly beryllium a "medium of exchange?" If you deliberation it should beryllium a store of value, past you bargain Bitcoin. If not, you bargain Bitcoin Cash.

In galore ways, the show of Bitcoin Cash this twelvemonth has been a marketplace anomaly. This mightiness beryllium oversimplifying things, but each year, Bitcoin tends to outperform Bitcoin Cash by a wide margin.