COMPARED with Brexit, Bitexit seems a piece of cake. On August 1st, without much agonising or awkward negotiations, a group of Bitcoin activists and entrepreneurs managed to create a second version of the crypto-currency. It immediately gained a following: as The Economist went to press, a unit of “Bitcoin Cash” had a price of $ 460 and tokens worth $ 7.6bn were in circulation (although that is still much smaller than Bitcoin classic, which stood at about $ 2,700 and nearly $ 45bn).
This “fork”, as such events are called, came earlier than expected. But it is how insiders had expected a two-year-old conflict over the future of Bitcoin to end. At the heart of this “civil war” was the question of how to increase the capacity of the system, which can handle only up to seven transactions per second. The new version is able to process more than 50 per second, but otherwise works much like the original one.
Will Bitcoin Cash be more than just another “altcoin”, as the many existing clones of the crypto-currency are called? It is backed by Chinese “miners”, firms that provide the computing power to confirm payments and mint new digital coins. They have been unhappy with how the original system has been managed by its developers—and made some further technical tweaks to ensure that the new Bitcoin…
The Economist: Finance and economics
