"FEDERAL Reserve deeply split. Renegade group of board members to create separate American dollar.” Such a headline seems highly unlikely, but this in essence is happening in the land of bitcoin, the digital currency. On August 15th two of bitcoin’s five main developers released a competing version, or “fork”, of the software that powers the currency—a move, some fear, that may split bitcoin.
The dispute is predictably arcane. The bone of contention is the size of a “block”, a batch of bitcoin transactions into which these are assembled before they are processed. Satoshi Nakamoto, the elusive creator of bitcoin who went offline in 2011, limited their size to 1Mb. That is enough to handle about 300,000 transactions per day—suitable for a currency used mainly by crypto-geeks, as bitcoin once was, but nowhere near enough to rival conventional payment systems. The likes of Visa and MasterCard can process tens of thousands of payments per second if needed.
By how much and when to increase this limit has long been a matter of a heated debate within the bitcoin community. One camp wants to set the number much higher and do it soon. Otherwise, they...Continue reading
Source :Business and finance http://ift.tt/1hJNn9q
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