After dipping below $6,000 earlier this month, the price of cryptocurrency Bitcoin surged as high as $8,040 Friday on one of the world’s largest exchanges, Bitfinex. Still, Friday’s surge in Bitcoin’s price comes amid growing institutional investor interest as well as an expected “hard fork” Friday that will introduce a new cryptocurrency for Bitcoin owners.
The Chicago Mercantile Exchange said it would offer Bitcoin futures by the end of the year, potentially opening the coin to a host of institutional investors. The leaders of the SegWit2x hard fork faction said just before Bitcoin’s price slid below $6,000 that they would suspend a proposal to increase the size of Bitcoin blocks from 1MB to 2MB.
But major Bitcoin exchanges say today that they still expect a small group of miners to go forward with the SegWit2x proposal, leading to the creation of a separate network and cryptocurrency. The thinking goes that part of Bitcoin’s price jump in recent months has been thanks to the anticipation surrounding the SegWit2x fork.
As a hard fork results in the creation of a new cryptocurrency, each Bitcoin investor receives an equal number of whatever the new coin may be. For example, in an August hard fork, Bitcoin investors received Bitcoin Cash in addition to their existing cryptocurrency funds.
http://fortune.com/2017/11/17/bitcoin-price-hard-fork-segwit2x/
