Yahoo Finance Bitcoin Eases From Record High as Split Averted
Investing.com – Bitcoin surged on Wednesday as the digital currency looks set to avoid undergoing the SigWit2x upgrade which would have a led to split in the underlying software supporting bitcoin.
On the U.S.-based Bitfinex exchange, bitcoin rose to $7232.4, up $130.4, or 1.84% after surging to new all-time high of $7899.9. Bitcoin's market cap rose to above 120 billion.
Developers behind the SegWit2x upgrade announced that they were suspending plans for the upgrade, which was slated to activate around November 16.
"Unfortunately, it is clear that we have not built sufficient consensus for a clean blocksize upgrade at this time. Continuing on the current path could divide the community and be a setback to Bitcoin's growth. This was never the goal of Segwit2x," a group of developers said in a note on Wednesday.
The next iteration of the Segregated Witness update – Segwit2x – would have increased the speed of transactions on the bitcoin network by increasing the size of “blocks” - files that store information on the network - from one megabyte to two megabytes (hence, the 2x).
Bitcoin transactions are limited to 1-megabyte every 10 minutes - or seven transactions per second. This compares to 2,000 per second for Visa and means that at peak times bitcoin transactions can take hours to be fulfilled, inhibiting the currency.
Other cryptocurrencies failed to follow bitcoin’s move higher, as bitcoin cash fell 6.19% to $567.09 while bitcoin gold fell 6.18% to $141.11.
Ethereum, the second largest cryptocurrency by market cap, rose 5.71% to $308.43.
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