Bitcoin Is on the Verge of Splitting in Two

Bitcoin is in the midst of a civil war. It has been simmering for some time, though it remained largely out of view to the general public until last month, when a prominent bitcoin developer announced that the cryptocurrency and the technology underlying it were, in his opinion, a failed experiment

In the three weeks since, a fascinating debate has played out across the globe, as the bitcoin community struggled to find a way forward. The future remains uncertain, but for now, the cryptocurrency has split in two, with the core development team going in one direction and a group of influential miners, exchanges and startups going in another, a separation known as a hard fork. They have created competing versions, Bitcoin Core and Bitcoin Classic, each stemming from the same source code, but now controlled by separate groups of programmers with major differences in their roadmaps.

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This article originally appeared on Recode.net.

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