What are experts saying about the fork?
There are differences of opinions within the bitcoin industry as to whether a fork is good or bad.
"These forks are very bad for bitcoin. Saturating the market with different versions of bitcoin is confusing to users, and discredits the claim that there are a limited number of bitcoins — since you can always fork it and double the supply," Sol Lederer, blockchain director at Loomia, said in an emailed statement Tuesday.
But some have said forks are a good part of any cryptocurrency ecosystem.
"If a crypto-community has irreconcilable differences, then you can go your separate ways and that is just fine," Bob Summerwill, chief blockchain developer at Sweetbridge, a company creating blockchain solutions, said in a statement Tuesday.
Still, there is bullishness around bitcoin. A survey carried out by CNBC last week asking where the bitcoin price was headed found that 49 percent of the 23,118 people who voted answered "above $10,000."
Bitcoin repeated Forks are perfect for it's long term success. Bitcoin cash and Bitcoin gold which launched in August and November respectively, both take the original currency in a new direction, attempting to fix some of its biggest flaws.
Ultimately, the hard fork was designed to fix what is a perceived problem at this point as it hasn’t created any real issues. Nonetheless, that problem is the idea that the miners as a whole, have too much influence over the direction of the bitcoin network. As a result, this update lessens their control by making a change to the mining algorithm that will work with cheaper graphics processing units, ultimately increasing the amount of miners in the pool and limiting control by diversification.
