The Next 24 Hours Will Decide Bitcoin’s Fate
▻https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/evdjvn/the-next-24-hours-will-decide-bitcoins-fate
For two years, the digital currency bitcoin has been deadlocked by a caustic debate—some call it a “civil war”—about how to best scale the technology up to allow for worldwide adoption. As the two opposing sides argued their positions, the rancor became so intense that at one point a former lead developer declared the entire bitcoin experiment a failure.
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Bitcoin is a digital currency, and every transaction is recorded on a public ledger called a “blockchain” for all to see. Right now, however, the bitcoin blockchain is facing a crisis of congestion. The “blocks” of bitcoin transaction data that are continuously being added to the blockchain are full, slowing everything down. Bitcoin transactions that should take 10 minutes to be included in a block, “confirming” them as legitimate, can now be stuck in limbo for hours or even days. Imagine paying for a donut with a debit card, but you have to wait four hours until it’s approved.
This situation, if left alone, would be bad for bitcoin. Because there’s less space in the blocks of transaction data, there’s more competition to have your transaction included in the next block to speed up the confirmation process. So, the fees that users can attach to their transactions in order to incentivize “miners” (people who run huge server farms to do the work of adding blocks to the blockchain for a reward) to have their transactions included in the next block are getting more expensive. This could effectively price certain uses of bitcoin for normals, like buying a $2 coffee, out of the system.