Bitcoin, Fork in the Path

When boiling down the issues and coming up with a solution, we can only ask one question: Will a hard fork be the solution?

With Bitcoin having such a massive increase in international adoption within the finance and tech industry, we also start to see a correlating increase in the number of total daily transactions on the Blockchain network. In just the last two years we have seen the price of Bitcoin increase by 410% and a massive increase of total daily transactions by 260%. While many people look at this in a positive way, we also see people take the view that Bitcoin is losing momentum or failing due to its current protocol, politics, and scalability.

Confirmed Daily Transactions — Bitcoin

While people are taking the increase in daily transactions negatively due to increases in transaction fee’s and confirmation times, it should also be seen positively because it’s a sign of its exponential success.

Bitcoin Core is currently going through a period of economic stagnation which is preventing it from progressing through the politics of the development process to evolve with the increase in transactions. Which is causing a lot of uncertainty for developers, miners, and stakeholders. During this time of uncertainty, we have seen a lot of new Blockchain projects come together, such as Bitcoin Unlimited, aka the debate.

What is Bitcoin Unlimited (BTU)?

Since bitcoin’s code is public for anyone to read or copy (fork) for their own project. As such, it’s possible for different versions of Bitcoin to run side-by-side on a completely different Blockchain.

While Bitcoin Unlimited is different from Bitcoin Core in such that the block size protocols are not hard-coded – nodes and miners flag support for the size that they want. Then, it relies on an idea called ‘emergent consensus’.

“In the unlikely case of a Blockchain split, we are not terribly concerned what exchanges decide to list the two tickers as in terms of name. We are encouraged that exchanges are well prepared for the event of a Blockchain split and that this will result in the market deciding which bitcoin will be the most useful and thus valuable in the long term.” — BitcoinUnlimited.info

Won’t This Affect The Price Negatively?
It is very difficult to understand if a hard fork on Bitcoin will have a negative or positive effect on its price. Though by studying other cases that are similar to the situation, we find ourselves today, able to gauge how the markets would react to a drastic change to its network.

Ethereum is a very good case-study when it comes to the possible future of a market, after a hard fork. Ethereum’s total combined market capital became 500% higher than before the fork, in just five months. Sure, we did see a slight dip in its price and market capital, but the adoption of the new protocol was very successful in comparisons to other Hard Fork cases. Having Bitcoin split into two different development communities could actually help them both grow, by sharing ideas of what works and what doesn’t.

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