The value of Bitcoin has shot up by 1,700 percent this year (Photo by George Frey/Getty Images)

The Bitcoin market can be a confusing place for the newbie.

So if you’re new to the world of cryptocurrencies, prepare to be baffled all over again.

A new kind of digital dosh called Bitcoin Cash is gaining mainstream acceptance and is now available to buy and sell through Coinbase, a major cryptocurrency exchange.

It’s valued at about £2,600 per coin, which is much lower than the £11,700 a Bitcoin is being sold for right now.


Bitcoin cash was created on August 1 when a group of Bitcoin miners announced that they would be ‘forking’ to create a new currency which makes trading faster and easier.

This graph shows how the price increase of Bitcoin Cash since its release in August (Picture: Coinbase)

The original Bitcoin works by logging all transactions into a record called the blockchain.



Bitcoin Cash ‘forked’ from this to effectively create a new blockchain which works more quickly than the older one.

Logging transactions on the Bitcoin blockchain is notoriously slow, with between three and 7 logged every second.

Bitcoin Cash is designed to work much faster and allow many more transactions to be logged at a speedier pace.

It can be traded just like any other cryptocurrency and is the second most valuable after Bitcoin, followed by Ethereum and LiteCoin.

This chart shows the price rise of Bitcoin over the past year

Yesterday, Bitcoin Cash jumped to $8,500 on Coinbase’s exchange on Tuesday afternoon, hours before the San Francisco-based exchange launched trading in bitcoin cash.

This prompted Coinbase to announce an investigation into possible insider trading and temporarily stop allowing the currency to be bought and sold.

Meanwhile, bitcoin, the world’s most popular cryptocurrency, fell more than 10 percent on Wednesday to a one-week low of $15,800. Bitcoin has risen some 1,700 percent this year and nearly 80 percent this month alone.

‘If we find evidence of any employee or contractor violating our policiess directly or indirectly, we will not hesitate to terminate the employee immediately,” Coinbase Chief Executive Brian Armstrong said in a blog post.

Additionally, Coinbase employees have been restricted from trading in bitcoin cash for several weeks, Coinbase said on Twitter.

Earlier on Tuesday, traders on Twitter alleged that news of Coinbase’s launch of bitcoin cash support had been leaked before the official announcement.

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