Bitcoin Showdown

Investment guru Bill Miller and his son, Bill Miller IV, are big bitcoin bulls, believing the digital currency whose price has soared this year is bound for disruptor status.

“It is a true disruptor and true innovation in money,” the elder Miller told CNBC. “We haven’t seen that in thousands of years.”

Everything is affected by this technology, most notably in the quality of the money we use.

F.A. Hayek’s dream of competing currencies is here. The list of crypto-currencies goes on and on, with the big news being what Bloomberg calls Bitcoin’s Civil War.

“The notoriously volatile cryptocurrency, whose 150 percent surge this year has captivated everyone from Wall Street bankers to Chinese grandmothers, could be headed for one of its most turbulent stretches yet,” write Lulu Yilan Chen and Yuji Nakamura.  

Opposing camps have been dickering for a couple years and “are poised to adopt two competing software updates at the end of the month” raising the possibility of bitcoin splitting in two, “an unprecedented event that would send shockwaves through the $41 billion market.”

Who Decides?

There is no Janet Yellen in the crypto-world to arbitrate this sort of monetary brouhaha. Decentralization is the silky petals of the crypto flower, but this battle between the miners and what is known as Core, a group of developers is thorny and no one knows how it will come out.   

Modern bitcoin miners have acres of warehouse space loaded with computers creating coins. Miners simply want the block size limit increased. The developers “insist that to ease blockchain’s traffic jam, some of its data must be managed outside the main network. They claim that not only would it reduce congestion, but also allow other projects including smart contracts to be built on top of bitcoin.”

The limited block size protects the integrity of the system, but has decreased its functionality and ability to compete as a payment processor.