Bitcoin is on a tear amid signs that its civil war is coming to an end
(Bitcoin has recouped most of its loses from over the weekend.MI)
Bitcoin is on track to recoup losses from its weekend crash thanks to signs that the civil war tearing the cryptocurrency community apart may soon reach a resolution.
Bitcoin tanked 20%, below $1,800 per coin over the weekend, but is now trading at around $2,300.
According to reporting by Bloomberg's Yuji Nakamura, that may be because bitcoin miners are getting on board with a software created to bridge the gap between the two opposing camps in the bitcoin community. If enough miners start using so-called SegWit2x, then a bitcoin split could be avoided.
"About 55 percent of blocks mined in the last 24 hours were done with SegWit2x," according to Nakamura. "If support reaches 80 percent and maintains that threshold for more than two days, it will move bitcoin closer to avoiding a split."
Antpool, the largest miner with $282.2 million in annualized mining proceeds, is one big player that has switched over to SegWit2x since its launch, according to Bloomberg.
On one side of the bitcoin war, there are so-called core developers who want to keep the blocks that make up bitcoin's network limited in their size to 1 megabyte per block. On the other side, are the miners who want to increase the size of blocks to make the bitcoin network faster.
In order to find the middle ground, some "business executives and miners" created a proposal called SegWit2X, which moves the threshold for implementation down to 80% and also allows for a small increase in the size of blocks on the chain to 2 MBs, according to Paul McNeal, a bitcoin evangelist.
To be sure, there are still "fundamentalists" on both sides of the argument standing their ground.
Arthur Hayes, the CEO of BitMex, a bitcoin derivative exchange, recently told Business Insider that he thinks a split, or fork, is very likely. When all is said and done, he thinks there could be up to four different bitcoin iterations.
As a result, he predicts the price of bitcoin will continue to rise and fall sporadically until the deadline for SegWit2x implementation on August 1.
"Sure, people are going to get out as a result of this uncertainty and the price will fall," Hayes said.
"But there are people with billions of dollars of skin in the game and they will ultimately go with the superior bitcoin network, and then the market will follow," Hayes concluded.
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