The Paradigmatic Case: Bitcoin Cash

In 2017, part of the community proposed increasing the block size to allow a greater number of transactions per second. This proposal clashed with those who defended keeping small blocks and scaling through off-chain solutions, such as Lightning Network.

The lack of consensus led to a hard fork:

• The original chain retained the name Bitcoin (BTC).

• The new version adopted the name Bitcoin Cash (BCH), with larger blocks and a more transactional orientation.

Both share the same history up to block 478559, but their approaches are substantially different.

Scalability	Layer 2 (Lightning Network)	On-chain scaling (large blocks)
Philosophy	Store of value	Everyday medium of payment
Governance	More decentralized	More concentrated among developers
Narrative	“Digital Gold”	“P2P electronic Cash”