Elaine Ou, Columnist

Someone Wants to Stick a Fork in Bitcoin

The digital currency is resistant to change. Some users don't like that.

March 16, 2017 at 12:00 AM UTC

Elaine Ou is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. She is a blockchain engineer at Global Financial Access in San Francisco. Previously she was a lecturer in the electrical and information engineering department at the University of Sydney.

Which bitcoin will prevail?
Photographer: George Frey/Getty Images

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A dispute among the people involved in bitcoin is revealing a paradox of the digital currency: The same resistance to human meddling that drove its popularity may also be its greatest limitation. It seems that the only way to get anything done is to split the currency in two.

At issue is the size of blocks, the batches in which transactions are processed and that make up the links in the so-called bitcoin blockchain. Currently, they’re so small that the whole system can handle only about seven transactions per second -- nowhere near enough to compete with, say, Visa network’s 24,000 transactions per second. Some people think that’s a good thing! Bitcoin relies on thousands of internet-connected volunteers, and their operating costs should be kept as low as possible.