This is post 3 of 4 in the series “The Cryptocurrency Debate: Perspective into the Bitcoin Civil War, Bitcoin Cash & More”
The two sides to the Bitcoin civil war
As elaborated in Part 2, a lack of consensus between the miners and core developers is what has led to the ongoing Bitcoin civil war. If the two sides fail to strike a compromise, two versions of Bitcoin’s blockchain will likely come into existence – effectively splitting the cryptocurrency. Let’s take a quick look at the developments so far, and those envisaged for the future.
Bitcoin’s development team supports the deployment of SegWit. Meanwhile, Bitcoin miners are focused on the November development which should increase the size of the Bitcoin block from 1MB to 2MB.
Why is November critical?
On August 1, Bitcoin miners successfully deployed the new protocol UASF BIP 148. This Phase 1 deployment of the Segwit2x proposal came around as a result of a compromise reached between the Core Developers (SegWit supporters) and the Miners (Hard Fork), known as the “New York Agreement.” The Bitcoin civil war will take a new turn now in early November when these miners advance towards adopting phase two of their deployment which encompasses the doubling of the size of the block.
Bitcoin Cash
The August 1 deployment led to the creation of Bitcoin cash, an offshoot of Bitcoin. Bitcoin Cash apparently raises the size of the block, which should enable more transactions to go forward at a faster pace, if and when blocks are created. Certain Bitcoin miners have been backing Bitcoin Cash since July. The new cryptocurrency supports block sizes of up to 8 MBs (as opposed to the current 1MB block infrastructure).
This new digital currency has already become a major player in the cryptocurrency market (ARKW) and is trading in the US (SPY) (IWM), China (FXI) (YINN), and South Korea (EWY) based exchanges, as discussed in Part 4 of this series.
This is post 3 of 4 in the series “The Cryptocurrency Debate: Perspective into the Bitcoin Civil War, Bitcoin Cash & More”