"Bitcoin is heading towards a hard fork in the road. Gavin Andresen, one of Bitcoin’s most important developers, announced today that he will move forward with a controversial code update that will leave miners and Bitcoin services on either side of an irreparable divide.
The plan, proposed earlier in May by Andresen, addresses worries that the Bitcoin network won’t be able to handle the load of large-scale adoption because of a predetermined hard cap on the size of "blocks," the name for the packets of transaction data that miners upload to the blockchain, the publicly viewable ledger of all Bitcoin transactions.
The solution he’s proposing is to increase the size of blocks from one megabyte to 20 with a code update. This means that fewer blocks would be uploaded to the blockchain overall, easing network congestion. But in doing so, it will also split the blockchain into two versions using the different block sizes, and miners and services will be forced to choose between them."
Full Story: http://motherboard.vice.com/read/bitcoin-is-about-to-fundamentally-change