How was Bitcoin Cash created?

In order to solve scalability the problem, the community needed to scale up the Bitcoin network.

The Bitcoin community was divided into two groups who disagreed on how to scale up Bitcoin network. The majority of the Bitcoin community and the Bitcoin Core developers wanted to implement something called Segwit, which makes room in the block by removing digital signatures out of the transaction. The original Bitcoin blockchain has implemented Segwit, which comes with many benefits. Segwit enables Lightning Network, which allows users to conduct off chain transactions that are instant and exceptionally cheap.

A group of Chinese miners believed Segwit was not enough for scaling Bitcoin. They wanted to increase the block size from 1MB to 8MB so more transactions can fit into each block. When there is a disagreement among that crypto community there will be a chain split. Bitcoin Cash was created on 1st of August 2017 as a result of hard fork. Hard fork is essentially a change to a Bitcoin’s code. Bitcoin forked into two separate cryptocurrencies. Bitcoin Cash is the new blockchain supported by the miners who wanted larger blocks and the original Bitcoin blockchain supported by the developers who wanted to implement Segwit.

Until 1st of August  2017, Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash shared a common transaction history.  If a person had Bitcoin on 1st of August he would automatically own exactly the same amount of Bitcoin Cash on the new chain. After 1st of August Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash are completely different cryptocurrencies that have unique separate transaction histories.