Why the split happened
Bitcoin blocks were limited to roughly one megabyte. As usage grew, that ceiling turned into a queue: transactions waited, and users bid fees up to jump ahead. At the peak, sending a few dollars in Bitcoin could cost more than the amount being sent.
Two camps disagreed about the fix. One wanted to keep blocks small and move volume to layers built on top. The other wanted bigger blocks so more transactions fit on the base chain. The disagreement did not resolve, and the second camp forked the network.
Bitcoin Cash raised the limit to 8 megabytes at launch and later to 32. Anyone holding Bitcoin at the moment of the split received an equal balance in BCH.
What a Bitcoin Cash transfer costs
Fractions of a cent, typically. Blocks arrive every ten minutes on average, the same as Bitcoin, so a first confirmation takes about that long, with most merchants waiting for one to three.
The fee is the whole argument for the network. A payment that costs a few dollars to send in Bitcoin costs almost nothing in BCH, and that gap does not close during busy periods, because the block ceiling is high enough that no queue forms.
Bitcoin Cash in a checkout
For a merchant, BCH is a cheap and predictable rail with one real constraint: comparatively few customers hold it.
That makes it an add-on rather than a headline option. It costs nothing to enable, it takes payments from the audience that does hold it, and it never becomes the coin that drives volume. Merchants selling to a crypto-native audience see more of it than everyone else.
If the goal is low fees rather than Bitcoin specifically, stablecoins on TRON or Solana usually cover the same need with far more customers holding them.
What the split left behind
Two details that still catch people out.
The shared history means every Bitcoin address that existed before August 2017 has a matching balance on the Bitcoin Cash chain. People occasionally discover coins they forgot they were entitled to, and occasionally lose them trying to claim them with the wrong software.
The address formats also overlapped for a time. Bitcoin Cash later moved to a distinct format called CashAddr, which starts with bitcoincash: or with q, precisely to stop cross-network mistakes. Older-style addresses still exist in the wild.