Bitcoin Cash (variably known as BCH or BCC[5]) is a cryptocurrency created on August 1, 2017,[6] at 00:20 UTC, in a hard fork process, split, from Bitcoin (BTC).[7] During the creation process, all Bitcoin users had their private reserves doubled, with the duplicates named "Bitcoin Cash", a cryptocurrency separate from the original Bitcoin, with different technical properties. It is governed by an alternative protocol that increases the transaction capacity compared to "classic" Bitcoin, this being the main point of the fork.[8] This will be allowed thanks to the differentiated block size, of 8 MB. This block, larger than the original, aims to help fix the scalability problem, an alternative solution to that adopted by Bitcoin, SegWit (Segregated Witness), so called the controversial code optimization that will be activated in the main Bitcoin blockchain. On December 19, 2017, Coinbase began allowing deposits of Bitcoin Cash, which allowed users who held Bitcoin on the platform at the time of the hard fork to obtain an equivalent amount in Bitcoin Cash.[9]