Here's Why Bitcoin Crashed by $1,000 in November

vnyrox (9)in #cryptocurrency • 7 years ago

Here's Why Bitcoin Crashed by $1,000 in November.

Bitcoin suffered a major price drop on Friday, with arguments over how to upgrade the cryptocurrency leading to buyers playing off against each other to try and profit.

On the Bitstamp exchange, bitcoin dropped to $6,800 at 7 a.m. Eastern time, before settling a few minutes later at a price of $6,870. It’s a sudden drop for a cryptocurrency that only just marked an all-time high, reaching $7,888 on Wednesday.

Bitcoin cash, on the other hand, surged up 35 percent to reach $850. This is a cryptocurrency that split off, or “forked”, from the existing bitcoin on August 1, the culmination of two years worth of arguments about the future of the currency. Bitcoin’s block size is only around one megabyte, which means that transactions are relatively slow. Among other changes, bitcoin cash ups the block size to eight megabytes.

Bitcoin was potentially on the verge of such a dramatic change, called SegWit2X. If it went ahead, next Friday would have forked bitcoin’s blockchain again, with the new version supporting block sizes of two megabytes. A plan called BIP 91 was hailed as a solution that would have maintained compatibility and stopped two parallel currencies forming.