Bitcoin’s incredible surge, which started last year, culminated on Saturday when it touched a new high of $3,470.87.
Not only is this the first time it has crossed the $3000 mark, it makes the news of it breaking $1,000 just eight months back seem like a lifetime ago.
It currently stands at $3,400, giving it a market value of almost $54 billion. This month alone it has risen by more than 15 percent.
Its derivative, the new Bitcoin Cash isn’t doing that well, trading at $223 after taking a 36-percent hit this Friday. The new currency reportedly has a $5 billion market value.
This split happened last Tuesday, after miners and developers decided to use Segwit2x, a new technology for boosting bitcoin’s transaction capacity. Segwit2x will allow the increase of the bitcoin blockchain’s size from 1 MB to 2 MB.
This problem has long been a hindering factor behind Bitcoin’s growth, since it doesn’t allow more than 7 transactions per second, causing issues with its scalability.
A rival group leading Bitcoin Cash however decided to take a different “hard fork” route than Segwit2x’s “soft fork”, leading to the new currency’s formation.
Increasing the blockchain size to 8 MB, this radical approach is not backward compatible with previous block chains, and views the other group’s proponents as simply delaying the problem and treating Bitcoin as an asset rather than as a currency.
It is already seeing halts in transactions, due to a “transaction malleability attack” on its network.
The Bitcoin update will hit on August 8th, and that’s when the real game begins.
