The price of Bitcoin is soaring over the last 24 hours as a split has been avoided in the very near term.
Just in the last 24 hours the price of Bitcoin has risen by almost 30%. Briefly getting near it's all time high before pulling back slightly.
A chart of the price action can be seen here:
As you can see the price is still holding up well and looks like it is ready to make another run at those all time highs.
Ironically, Goldman Sachs called this very type of price action almost a month ago, it can be seen here:
https://steemit.com/bitcoin/@jrcornel/what-to-expect-from-bitcoin-in-the-very-near-term
To be fair, @jrcornel also called similar price action as well as probably most of the investing world. Goldman just happened to list exact numbers, and they were right on so far.
The cause of the price rise?
The price started rallying as Bitcoin's miners started announcing their support for BIP 91. This was considered the much less radical proposal of several that were floating about.
This proposal would avoid a hard fork as it stops short of altering the hard-coded limit set on transaction capacities while still offering a slightly enlarged transaction capacity.
Basically, it is what most were expecting. The "kicking the can down the round" option that so readily gets adopted whenever monumental problems surface.
BIP 91 was officially activated when 80% of all the processing power voted in favor. That was achieved late yesterday (June 20th). Currently over 97% of all the processing power on the network is voting in favor of BIP 91.
Not out of the woods just yet.
Now that the support is there, enough of the miners have to now run the software that implements this proposal within the next two and a half days. If a majority does not do this within the time frame, it would mean that BIP 91 would not activate and we would be back to square one.
Also, this proposal solves the least amount of problems, meaning that the underlying issues are likely to come up again. There still needs to be more done to handle scaling issues or users will simply leave Bitcoin for other blockchains over time.
However, for now, all systems are go.
Once we get enough miners running the software it will officially be launch time.
That is until the next scaling issue comes up again in a couple months. :)
Stay informed my friends!
Sources:
https://qz.com/1035565/bitcoin-price-and-segwit-the-cryptocurrency-is-surging-because-a-hard-fork-has-been-averted/
Image Sources:
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-07-18/bitcoin-jumps-as-miners-take-first-step-to-avoid-currency-split
http://www.coindesk.com/price/
http://www.tokkoro.com/1979150-forest.html
Follow me: @jrcornel