Will Bitcoin's growing pains solve congestion or lead to a complete split?

According to the market data of OKCoin, the price of Bitcoin plunged rapidly from March 18 to March 20, from the highest price of 7,600 yuan to 6,600 yuan, a drop of 1,000 yuan. Why is the price of Bitcoin affected? It is reported that the hard fork will create two new Bitcoin brands, essentially transferring some brand value to Bitcoin Unlimited (BU). BU is an alternative software to Bitcoin software, which aims to expand the capacity of the network by increasing the block size of Bitcoin.

As we all know, the long-term storage value of Bitcoin lies in its limited total of 21 million, as well as its stability, security and scarcity. As Bitcoin becomes more well-known, the scale of its users is also growing, which has also caused the problem of Bitcoin network congestion. The Bitcoin network only allows about 7 transactions per second, which is too low for a global user base of tens of millions. On February 22, according to the blockchain.info website, the Bitcoin network was severely congested, with about 900,000 transactions waiting to be confirmed that day.

High transaction fees and slow confirmation speeds have caused dissatisfaction among miners and traders. Gavin Andresen, chief scientist of the Bitcoin Foundation, therefore suggested increasing the maximum block size of Bitcoin by 50% every year to increase the transaction capacity of the Bitcoin network. In a recent blog post of the Bitcoin Foundation, Andresen mentioned that in order to achieve this goal, a hard fork of the Bitcoin network is needed.

There has been debate in the market regarding hard forks, with some believing that they are inevitable or that they are “not a bad thing.

Others believe that if there is no hard fork, Bitcoin may rise to $3,000 this year. In the past few weeks, the miner support rate of the BU client has gradually increased. On March 17, Antpool switched 75% of its computing power to support BU. That night, nearly 90% of the mining pool's computing power turned to support BU. Now, Bitclub has also begun to quietly change the game process, switching from the previous Core client to BU. Currently, Bitclub has a computing power of 3.2% of the total Bitcoin network computing power. With this part of computing power plus the computing power support of Antpool, the support rate of BU has been greatly improved. According to incomplete statistics, the miner support rate of BU is around 35%.