The world’s most popular cryptocurrency has split in two. Bitcoin Cash, a hard fork from normal Bitcoin, has been introduced to combat high transaction fees and manage problems with Bitcoin size limits.
What this means for more Bitcoin owners is that digital wallets will be supporting one of the two currencies. This presents a choice for owners to decide on whether they want to stick with that digital wallet or move their funds to a different service that supports their preferred cryptocurrency.
Bitcoin owners who hold their own private keys are free to adopt the new forked currency on their own.
The price of Bitcoin dipped by four percent after the fork and currently stands at $2754 (about RM11800). Bitcoin Cash, on the other hand, is currently priced at $436 (about RM1870).
All cryptocurrencies run the risk of this kind of fork as the size of each block rises. Some currencies have larger blocks to alleviate this problem, but it will come around at some point as more currency enters circulation. Bitcoin simply reached the limit first, although that may have something to do with the relatively small 1MB block size.
Chances are that this fork won’t affect Bitcoin that much, but it does muddle things by introducing yet another cryptocurrency into the market.
[Source: The Verge]
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