A Second Fork: Bitcoin to Create a New Cryptocurrency

Not long after a hard fork split Bitcoin in two, creating Bitcoin Cash, there are moves to create a third currency from Bitcoin. Agreed in May 2017, a group attempting to combine the efforts of the original platform with the updated block size of the fork currency is seeking to establish this third currency. The new block will be created after block 494,784, which will be sometime in November. Signatories to the agreement include 58 companies located in 22 countries as well as 20.5 million Bitcoin wallets.

The Split

The decision to split was borne out of a disagreement in how to solve the transaction capacity issues, either by updating the platform and using segregated witnessing or increasing the size of blocks. The popularity of Bitcoin is what caused such an issue, the blocks simply could not be created fast enough to facilitate the rising popularity of transactions. With more blocks to facilitate greater amounts of transactions – 8mb compared to Bitcoin’s 1mb – Bitcoin Cash solves this fundamental difficulty. Bitcoin proceeded to use an updated SegWit to improve transaction times, by removing unnecessary data from the blocks, freeing up more space for transactions, whereas Bitcoin Cash when for straight up more storage. Comparatively, Bitcoin has 1mb sized blocks and SegWit, Bitcoin Cash has 8mb to play with, whilst not sporting SegWit.

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