A new iteration of Bitcoin, called Bitcoin Cash, looks like a tentative success after its launch on Tuesday — but its price has been wildly fluctuating, hitting a peak of $747, according to Coin Market Cap, and dropping to about $368 around the time of writing. That means its market cap went up to around $12 billion basically overnight and then plummeted to about $6 billion in roughly six hours.
The original Bitcoin network got very slow as new users joined. Bitcoin developers proposed an upgrade to Bitcoin that would speed up the mining process, or how new bitcoins are generated, which will be implemented in November. But some key Bitcoin developers didn’t think the planned upgrade would speed things up enough, so they split off into their own project. The first Bitcoin Cash “block” was mined yesterday.
It’s impressive that Bitcoin Cash is worth anything at all, especially since some prominent Bitcoin figures have rejected it. Coinbase, the largest digital currency exchange, said it would not support Bitcoin Cash. Some of its users are threatening to sue now that it seems Bitcoin Cash is actually worth something.
