What is 'Bitcoin Cash'?

Bitcoin, dear readers, is back on its bullshit with a new plan to split the virtual currency into two versions on August 1. This news comes just days after bitcoiners rallied around a solution to avoid such a split.

The new version of bitcoin, which supporters are calling "Bitcoin Cash," is being pitched as a refuge for bitcoiners who want the virtual currency to scale up to worldwide adoption but who don't agree with some of the more popular proposals to do so.

This might surprise you if you've been following the "scaling debate," an ongoing war of words between elements of the bitcoin community regarding how best to implement a code change that would allow the network to handle more transactions. Right now, the "blocks" of transaction data that make up the blockchain, bitcoin's public ledger, are full. This causes a bottleneck, forcing transactions that should take about 10 minutes to be confirmed to take hours or even days. For about two years, the bitcoin community has been careening towards the possibility of a fork that would split the network into two versions; one that will support the code change, and another that won't.