Bitcoin, Which Has Been Called an Innovative Payment Network and a New Kind of Money, Now Needs to Prove It Is Not Dead.
In the past Bitcoin has been regarded as the future. It has been the centre of many controversies, and has been on the receiving end of interested people wanting to learn more about it. Major Banks were interested in it, the market place was changing, startup companies were being fueled by the currency and the technology that powered it.
Jobs were created and investments were made. Then it all changed. The debate on the decentralized payment system grew bigger and lawmakers from across the world were drawn in.
Bitcoin, which has been called an innovative payment network and a new kind of money, now needs to prove it is not dead.
Bitcoin is basically a payment system and a digital asset. The system is peer-to-peer which means users can transact directly without an intermediary. It is created as a reward for payment processing work in which users offer their computing power to verify and record payments into a public ledger. This activity is called mining and miners are rewarded with transaction fees and Bitcoins.
The Chinese Bitcoin exchange organized a meeting in an attempt to make progress on a major issue, one that was tearing the Bitcoin community apart as it became more widely used, the underlying software’s questionable capacity to process the growing number of transactions.
Whether it can deal with the huge number of transactions remains one issue, however the currency remains clouded in controversies. A lead developer quit and declared Bitcoin dead, the reason he gave was simple the Bitcoin network could run out of capacity as the volume of transactions increased. When the network runs out of capacity it would become unreliable and vulnerable to fraud.
The media attention over the issue also arose from developers who split off and coded a different version of the software thus making it very difficult for users to decide what action to take. To switch or to stay?
At the meeting organized by the Chinese Bitcoin exchange, the developers finally came to a consensus on what to do. An agreement was signed which supported doubling Bitcoin’s capacity around the end of April, and then introducing a new version of the Bitcoin that would be the standard version by July 2017. But the new version the Bitcoin core software has both fans and haters.
Companies investing in Bitcoin based projects would have to continue relying on the same original core group of developers, who prioritize freedom from censorship and decentralization over earning profits.
The new version made by the developers who quit the original group is called Bitcoin classic. This has some supporters as well. They still urge others to switch to Bitcoin classic and feel there hasn’t been much done yet and the decisions regarding the future of the original Bitcoin are not enough.
However a spike in Bitcoin prices after the agreement was made suggested that investors were not worried.The bitcoin still remains the best example for a decentralized financial system. It still remains to be seen what will happen in the future of this digital asset.
