BitcoinCash launch

[bankingbitcoin]

So me and my team are doing some DD on bitcoin forks: how they happen, etc...

We wanted to take a closer look at how BitcoinCash launched but did not find any info - at least not credible one. My question specifically focuses on how BitcoinCash launched - was it an airdrop to all the bitcoin holders on the BCH chain? was it a claim? how did they distribute the tokens?

I guess I want to know the details of how that "transition" happened in practice for their supporters.

I thank everyone for seeing/contributing to this in advance

BankersofZug

[1715031408]

1715031408

[Oshosondy]

Assuming you have 1 BTC (bitcoin) before the fork, you will automatically have 1 BCH (bitcoin cash) which you can use your bitcoin private key to claim. With that, BCH too has the same supply of 21 million coins just like bitcoin. Also the BCH on other wallets after the fork was the same as the bitcoin circulatory supply at the time.

[bankingbitcoin]

I know the tokenomics of BCH I just wanted to know how the claiming process worked.

Was it:
(i) a developer "bridge adress" -- meaning you sent bitcoin, locked them and recived $BCH on the BitcoinCash chain?
(ii) your wallet got automatically "credited" tokens on the BitcoinCash chain at a 1:1 pro rata to your bitcoin holdings and no transaction was necessary? - this would be called an airdrop for us
(iii) you had to claim your $BCH tokens through a faucet but were eligible to claim your tokens at 1:1 pro rata basis?

[hosseinimr93]

Any bitcoin transaction that has been included in blocks 0-478558 exists in BCH blockchain as well. This means that if you had bitcoin when block number 478558 was mined, you can use the private key of your bitcoin address to spend your BCH.

For more information, read the guide provided by LoyceV.
LoyceV's Bitcoin Fork claiming guide (and service)

[mocacinno]

I agree with the other posters, but just wanted to clarify this a bit further.

Bitcoin cash isn't a token... It's not running on some other chain... It's a fork from bitcoin, it shares/shared most of the codebase of bitcoin, and (as others pointed out) it also shared all the historic blocks up untill the blockheight which was hardcoded in BCH's sourcecode.

This means there was no "airdrop" or "developer address". If you imported your private key into a BCH wallet, you had all the same unspent outputs on BCH as on BTC (untill you spent them offcourse).

[LoyceV]

I know the tokenomics of BCH I just wanted to know how the claiming process worked.

There is no "claiming process" in a Fork. By definition, a Fork means the existing blockchain is unchanged, then "Forks" into 2 separate new blockchains. To "claim" it, you need to import your old private keys into the Forkcoin's wallet. But not before you safely move your Bitcoins, some Fork wallets have stolen people's funds.
Think of it as a fork in the road: you can either take a right, or a left. But in crypto, you can follow both.

There have been much dirtier Forks, including pre-mining for the creator at the moment of the Fork. It was a hype years ago, and died off just like the ICO hype before it, and just like the Defi/NFT hypes after it.