Blockchain.info announced support for Bitcoin Cash on Thursday. Starting today, users of the company’s online wallet can store, exchange, and send Bitcoin Cash within those wallets. As part of the announcement, Bitcoin Cash that was held on Blockchain.info’s wallet when it split from Bitcoin on August 1st is now available.
What Is Bitcoin Cash?
Bitcoin Cash is the name of a cryptocurrency that split from Bitcoin in what is referred to as a fork. It was the result of competing camps within the Bitcoin community working to improve the technology. With two groups pursuing different directions, some miners broke off to support Bitcoin Cash, causing the blockchain to fork.
What that meant was the instantaneous creation of a brand new cryptocurrency with the same past as Bitcoin, but a different future with new transactions on its own blockchain.
Bitcoin Cash has its own value, and is trading at US$314.734, as of this writing. That’s a small fraction of the $5,330 Bitcoin is trading at at the same moment, but Bitcoin Cash still has a market cap of $5.2 billion.
How Bitcoin Cash on Blockchain.info Works
This is how Bitcoin Cash works on Blockchain.info. If you held Bitcoin on August 1st at the moment of the fork, you had the exact same amount of Bitcoin Cash, whether or not you knew it. Better yet, it’s still there, even if you’ve since spent or transferred those original Bitcoins.
Until now, however, the only way to access it was to export the keys to your wallet and important them into a wallet that supported Bitcoin Cash. As noted above, if you didn’t do that, your Bitcoin Cash are still on Blockchain.info awaiting you.
Accessing Bitcoin Cash on Blockchain.info
To access your Bitcoin Cash on Blockchain.info, log in to your wallet. Go to Settings > General, and look for “Bitcoin Cash – My Bitcoin Wallet” at the bottom of the page. There you’ll see your balance (if any), including a value in $ or whatever unit of fiat money you’ve set.
From there, you can send your Bitcoin Cash (BCH) to another address, leave it sitting, or exchange it for Bitcoin or Ethererum. That said, the option to exchange Bitcoin Cash was removed shortly after the announcement was made. The company hasn’t yet followed that up with information on when it will return. I’ll update this article when it reappears.
If you exchange your Bitcoin Cash for Bitcoin or Ethereum, it will be deposited into your Blockchain.info wallet, where you can do with as you will.
Blockchain.info said it may expand support for Bitcoin Cash in the future. My reading of that is the company is waiting to see how much its customers use the cryptocurrency.
Hi domsin, I personally have used Blockchain.info and Coinbase. Coinbase has the benefit of also being an exchange, but they’ve both been rock steady online wallets.
I haven’t used desktop Bitcoin wallets—though I’ve used several altcoin desktop wallets, mainly because the two online wallets above have been so convenient. Some cryptocurrency diehards can not fathom anyone trusting their bitcoins to someone else’s computer, but we all have our own levels of acceptable risk.
Bryan, thanks for this post about Bitcoin Cash. I have not been keeping track since the fork.
On a related note, I was previously using MultiBitHD, a desktop wallet that is no longer being supported. Can you recommend the best wallets for Mac OS Desktop? Hardware wallet? Cloud wallet?