Bitcoin Cash’s (Actual) Block Sizes Are A Tiny Fraction of Bitcoin’s

Bitcoin Cash’s (BCH) blockchain is hardly being used when compared to Bitcoin’s.

Longhash.com, using data provided by Coinmetrics.io found that in the last month, after the Bitcoin Cash “Fork Wars” had time to cool off, Bitcoin Cash (ABC) has produced blocks averaging a paltry 3.7% the size of Bitcoin’s – despite having a far larger block size capacity.

Longhash said that the average was 34 KB (out of an 8,000 KB capacity) versus 923 KB, for BCH and BTC respectively. At time of writing, BCH’s daily block size is about 4 MB versus BTC’s 137 MB. And more data from the visualized block illustrator Txstreet.com puts BCH’s realized transactions per second at roughly 0.14, versus BTC’s approximate 3.5.

BCH’s block sizes have definitely been on the wane since the acrimonious hard fork, which CryptoGlobe covered at length. Whereas for most of 2018 the chain would regularly manage more than 10 MB per day worth of transaction traffic, the traffic after the forking drama – which produced massive spikes even beyond Bitcoin’s traffic – has fallen to all time lows (see chart below).

(BTC is red, BCH is blue; source: Coinmetrics.io)

The forked-off Bitcoin Satoshi’s Vision (BSV) has generally outperformed BCH during the month of December, in terms of transaction sizes – but the two blockchains seem to have converged in the new year to the same paltry lows (see chart below).

(BSV is red, BCH is blue; source: Coinmetrics.io)

A final thing to note concerning block sizes is that Bitcoin’s are slowly trending upward, since almost halving during March-April 2018. Today’s average, according to Bitinfocharts.com was 761 KB. From November 2017 to March 2018, Bitcoin’s blocks were consistently being filled near capacity, presumably crashing in April 2018 as a result of the difficult bear market which set in at that time. (see chart below).

(source: Bitinfocharts.com)

(Featured image courtesy of TxStreet.com)