The past five days have been a thrill–ride for the cryptocurrency, which jumped to an all-time high of $7879 on Wednesday, then slid into the weekend, before rebounding about 10% on Monday to a recent $6466. In just the past 24 hours, shares have traded in a 21% range.
Cryptocurrency analysts and investors point to a struggle between different players in the Bitcoin community, and particularly between the core Bitcoin blockchain and a spinoff called Bitcoin Cash that was created to make it easier to buy and sell items using Bitcoin. The benefit of Bitcoin Cash is that it’s designed to process transactions more quickly, so that people can actually use it to pay for items, unlike the slower Bitcoin network.
Bitcoin itself was supposed to be upgraded through another fork this month to allow for faster transactions, but that upgrade was called off on Wednesday amid infighting. So some investors, and the miners that record Bitcoin transactions shifted to Bitcoin Cash.
Miners have the incentive to help boost the price of Bitcoin Cash so that they have more tokens to mine, said Ari Paul, co-founder of cryptocurrency hedge fund BlockTower Capital.
http://www.barrons.com/articles/bitcoin-the-apple-microsoft-of-the-21st-century-1510613429
Topic: Bitcoin: The Apple-Microsoft of the 21st Century? (Read 139 times)
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