[2017-04-11] Mint: Bitcoin’s existential crisis

[polynesia]

Bitcoin’s existential crisis

http://www.livemint.com/Industry/Ad3mtorzEzQYQ1Txcy6TRL/Bitcoins-existential-crisis.html

If you trade in bitcoins, or even are a bitcoin enthusiast, it’s unlikely that you would have missed the raging debate around the cryptocurrency. Known as the bitcoin “fork”, the controversy potentially threatens to split the bitcoin currency, whose price is currently around $1,200, into two.

For the uninitiated, there are two factions at the heart of the debate, which is primarily about how to scale up the bitcoin to handle more transactions. The two current camps are: Bitcoin Unlimited and Segregated Witness (SegWit). Bitcoin Unlimited aims to remove the block size limit altogether, thereby allowing the miners to reach a consensus on their own. SegWit offers a moderate increase of the block size to up to 4 megabytes (MB), moving some non-critical data out of the blocks.