Bitcoin Core vs Bitcoin Classic – The Civil War


Bitcoin, this seemingly revolutionary crypto currency that’s been around for a significant amount of time now, is currently on the verge of a civil war. This is fueled by the fact that one of the leading and prominent developers – Mike Hearn, who used to be a Google engineer, openly stated that he truly believes that Bitcoin was, in fact, a failed experiment.

With this in mind, it’s worth noting that there are two separate fronts starting to form – the bitcoin core which is consisted of the core members of the initial development team and the bitcoin classic. The latter contains an enthusiastic group of miners with influence, startups as well as exchanges that are proposing the exact opposite of the core. This difference seems to have paralyzed the system with the infighting that has occurred throughout the last few months. Although Bitcoin Core and Bitcoin Classic are using the same  source code base, they are essentially two entirely different groups advocating completely different roadmaps.

Whichever group wins will have an impact on the particular implementation and resilience of the blockchain technology which is an underlying part of Bitcoin. Some believe that the revolutionary bitcoin idea which is currently valued at around $5 billion could just as well turn to dust. I’m not one of those people.

To understand the context, it’s essential to understand that the system works as miners are using complex processing power to go through math problems on an openly distributed ledger (meaning everyone with an internet connection can access and download it) which is referred to as the blockchain. For this work, they are rewarded with bitcoins in blocks and up until this moment, each block in the blockchain has been limited to be no more than 1 mb in size. This particular limit becomes troubling for people who want the system to thrive, a.k.a the Bitcoin classic as the volume becomes incapable of satisfying the needs of suppliers and providers, and hence – the bitcoin is becoming unreliable.

The opposite fraction – the Bitcoin core, comes from the fact that if they increase the volume of the blocks in the chain this would lead to a huge requirement for larger computing power which is going to significantly limit the ability of the majority to mine bitcoins in the first place because they would simply be unable to.

It’s currently unclear how this metaphorical civil war is going to end but one thing is clear – the nature of bitcoin as we know it so far is much likely to change entirely and this is likely to have an impact on a lot of associated startups and miners and even exchanges that trade with the crypto currency.