What bitcoin’s split could mean for cryptocurrency’s future

“But having a fork at this point, you have two bitcoins”. Bitcoin’s split has created a new competitor to the original digital currency, which remains the oldest and most valuable in circulation. Bitcoin Cash wants to increase the block size – the files in which transactions are recorded – while SegWit2X would transfer some of the operating power outside of the main blockchain. It was enough of a compromise to avert a serious and widespread cleft in the community.

As a prelude to the split, Bitcoin trading platforms like CEX.io suspended Bitcoin withdrawals beforehand.

In June, Bitcoin stocks rose to a new high of $3,041.36, according to CNBC reports.

The developers, however, are more concerned with security than making money, so they’re not as anxious about network speed, only that it’s safe from exploit. Peeved by what they see as a harmful lack of progress toward increasing the number of transactions the Bitcoin system can handle (seven per second, compared with thousands handled by conventional systems like Visa’s), they have taken matters into their own hands, and launched Bitcoin Cash.

Luis Cuende cofounder and project lead at Aragon, a company founded to disintermediate the creation and maintenance of companies and other organizational structures.

Miners are what make the Bitcoin world run.

Bitcoin cash, however, proposes an easier concept to get your head around – instead of creating a parallel track, why not just increase each of the data limits from 1MB to 8MB? Ryan Taylor, chief executive of Dash Core, a firm that manages the development of the Dash digital currency, said Bitcoin Cash may yet be short-lived.

But some in the Bitcoin community thought the proposal did not go far enough, leading to the ‘hard fork’.

Bitcoin Cash will become the new default Bitcoin only if it can persuade coin miners to shift over to the new currency.

“The good news is that we’ll see experimentation along two distinct preference clusters”.

Splitting Bitcoin means devaluing it.

“It appears the fork’s impact small”. However, it could also hurt bitcoin’s long-term prospects, according to Vinny Lingham, CEO of tech start-up Civic.

Will BCash last in the long term or even short term? “It’s stimulating discussion after two years of stagnation (where) the network couldn’t figure out governance issues”.

At the same time, futures for bitcoin cash have jumped almost 25 percent over the past 24 hours to $346.98, according to data from Coinmarketcap.