Bitcoin’s developers are at odds over its future. But a clear path forward has already been charted.
On Saturday, Mike Hearn, a key developer of Bitcoin software, posted a blunt essay on Medium explaining why the cryptographic currency’s underlying open-source core software is now proceeding along two separate development paths, or forks. As with everything related to Bitcoin, the move is part software, part ideology, part political wrangling, and part finance. In this case, a low-level plumbing issue was threatening to burble up and swamp the network’s ability to function unless a change was made. Disagreements over the timing and type of change had stalled resolution.
