For some time, bitcoin has faced a scaling issue, where the number of transactions that can happen on the blockchain at any one time is limited to 1 megabyte (1MB) every 10 minutes. This creates a backlog of transactions that need to be processed and slows things down.
The bitcoin community has been divided on the best way of solving this. One solution is a system called Segregated Witness (SegWit) which would increase the speed of transactions, but it required 95 percent support from miners and the community to be added to the blockchain and there has been resistance.
Uncertainty over bitcoin's future has caused the price to decline in recent weeks. Bitcoin fell about 12 percent on Sunday morning, due to these concerns.
However, bitcoin miners are being forced to respond to the issue.
What's the solution?
Several members of the community have rallied around a solution called BIP 148. This would involve a "user-activated soft fork", where bitcoin users would force the blockchain to split by rejecting any block of bitcoins that did not signal support for SegWit. BIP 148 was due to come into force on August 1 and if the majority of developers didn't agree on the proposal, the blockchain could split.
"Since a large faction of miners would continue to mine Bitcoin with non-segwit blocks in the case of the BIP148, then two Bitcoins would exist. One in which SegWit is active and one in which it is not," explained Charles Hayter, chief executive and founder of digital currency comparison website CryptoCompare, told CNBC via email.
"This can have disastrous results for one of the chains or even both. This may be one of the main factors behiWit2X t
