(Bitcoin-themed balloons at the "Inside Bitcoins: The Future of Virtual Currency Conference" in New York.Reuters/Lucas Jackson)
Bitcoin power brokers were unable to come behind a single solution that would have preserved a unified cryptocurrency by Tuesday morning's deadline.
As such, the digital currency has officially forked and split in two: bitcoin cash and bitcoin.
Miners were able to seek out bitcoin cash beginning Tuesday morning, and the cryptocurrency-focused news website CoinDesk said the first bitcoin cash was mined at about 2:20 p.m. ET.
"There seems to be some technical issues that might be slowing it down, but yes, the fork has happened," Peter Borovykh of Blockchain Driven, a blockchain technology company, told Business Insider earlier on Tuesday.
Miners are the folks who solve complex computer problems using software to unleash digital coins into the market. It took a couple of hours after the official fork for miners to unlock the first bitcoin cash coins.
"It seems as if people overestimated the mining power, or the support from miners — hence, it is taking far longer than most expected," Iqbal Gandham, the UK managing director at the social investment network eToro, said in a statement sent to Business Insider just before the split.
Bitcoin was the first digital currency built on blockchain technology, in which transactions are independently verified by the network without the need of a middleman like a bank. Bitcoin cash is built on the same blockchain network as bitcoin, but the new software increases the size of the "blocks" that make up the network to allow it to process more information.
Supporters of the newly formed bitcoin cash believe the currency will "breath new life into" the nearly 10-year-old bitcoin by addressing some of the issues facing bitcoin of late, such as slow transaction speeds.
Bitcoin power brokers have been squabbling over the rules that should guide the cryptocurrency's blockchain network.
On one side are the so-called core developers. They are in favor of smaller bitcoin blocks, which they say are less vulnerable to hacking. On the other side are the miners, who want to increase the size of blocks to make the network faster and more scalable.
Until last week, the solution known as Segwit2x, which would double the size of bitcoin blocks to 2 megabytes, seemed to have universal support.
Servers for data storage are seen at Advania's Thor Data Center in Hafnarfjordur, Iceland August 7, 2015. REUTERS/Sigtryggur Ari