Bitcoin (Exchange: BTC=-USS) miners are signaling their intent to support a new upgrade for the bitcoin blockchain that may solve the digital currency's long-running scaling issue.

Several of the largest bitcoin miners (who create new bitcoins and support the blockchain), including AntPool, BitClub, Bixin, BTC.com and BitFury, have started showing their support for bitcoin improvement proposal (BIP) 91, by adding a piece of code to each new block of bitcoins they generate.

The miners were not expected to start coding their support for BIP 91 until July 21. Already, 66 percent of the last 144 blocks created signal support for it. The proposal needs 80 percent support to be "locked in" to the blockchain permanently. This will bring relief as it prevents the blockchain splitting into two separate chains, which would effectively create two different coins.

"Barring any unexpected twists in the bitcoin scaling drama, a contentious fork will be avoided in the coming days," Garrick Hileman, economic historian at the London School of Economics, told CNBC via email.

"The prospect of a contentious August fork has been hanging over bitcoin's price like a sword of Damocles, and so the 20 percent plus price pop we've seen in the last 24 hours is not surprising."

Bitcoin has recovered from a roughly 8-week low of $1,863 on Sunday to around $2329 today, according to Coindesk data.

What's the problem with bitcoin?

For some time, bitcoin has faced a scaling issue, where the number of transactions that can happen on the blockchain at any one time is limited to 1 megabyte (1MB) every 10 minutes. This creates a backlog of transactions that need to be processed and slows things down.

The bitcoin community has been divided on the best way of solving this. One solution is a system called Segregated Witness (SegWit) which would increase the speed of transactions, but it required 95 percent support from miners and the community to be added to the blockchain and there has been resistance.

Uncertainty over bitcoin's future has caused the price to decline in recent weeks. Bitcoin fell about 12 percent on Sunday morning, due to these concerns.

However, bitcoin miners are being forced to respond to the issue.

What's the solution?

Several members of the community have rallied around a solution called BIP 148. This would involve a "user-activated soft fork", where bitcoin users would force the blockchain to split by rejecting any block of bitcoins that did not signal support for SegWit. BIP 148 was due to come into force on August 1 and if the majority of developers didn't agree on the proposal, the blockchain could split.