Bitcoin improvement proposal receives green signal and price shoots

After years of heated debate and various bids at the table, the bitcoin community can finally commemorate the fact that network miners have reached a consensus on the first stage of the process to increase asset transaction processing capacity digital.

At 9:15 pm on Thursday, July 20, the Bitcoin 91 Improvement Proposal (BIP91) obtained the necessary support from the miners and was integrated into the Bitcoin protocol code. This prevents the bitcoin network from being split on August 1st, as it could happen with BIP148 (also known as User Activated Soft Fork, which would be implemented by network users in response to miners).

In practice, BIP91 will allow, in about two days, when it is effectively activated, that the other proposed improvement called SegWit (Segregated Witness in the English term - Free translation) - which is the main implementation that aims To increase the transaction checking power of the bitcoin blockchain - to finally take effect. SegWit aims to make bitcoins transactions lighter, and would increase the number of transactions that could be included in each block.

Analysts believe that in the face of the partial resolution of the imbroglio that involves the scalability of the bitcoin network, the asset price recovers its bullish trend. This Thursday, bitcoin has accumulated appreciation of more than 22% in the international market. In Brazil, more than 2.2 thousand bitcoins were traded on the brokerage platforms, and the price also showed a strong high, being quoted around R $ 8,800 at the time of closing of this report, according to the BRXBT index of bitvalor.com.

"During the last few weeks, the market has been operating under strong expectations regarding the progress of SegWit. With progress against miners, the risk horizon for a possible split of the network in the month of August declines significantly, which serves as a fuel to resume bullish positions and the price moves back towards USD3,000, "says Safiri Felix, Entrepreneur who invests in bitcoin since 2013.

After SegWit is activated, the focus will be on the definition around the SegWit2X proposal, which aims to increase the current capacity of the transaction blocks, which is 1MB, to 2MB by means of a permanent division of the network (hard fork In English), which may occur in November of this year. This proposal was agreed upon by most of the miners during the Consensus conference held in May in New York and has no support from bitcoin's core developer and much of the user community.