Previously, Cointelegraph reported that Bitcoin price declined to $926 due to hard fork contingency and the likelihood of Bitcoin Unlimited being forked by its closed group of developers. Bitcoin price bounced back to $1,115 in the earning morning of March 22.
However, almost immediately after Bitcoin price recovered back to the $1,115 margin, it plummeted to $1,010, due to the ambiguity surrounding the execution of the Bitcoin Unlimited hard fork. Because of the possibility of Bitcoin Unlimited creating a split chains and two tokens of the Bitcoin network, both investors and traders worry that the introduction of BTU (Bitcoin Unlimited token) will lead to the decline of Bitcoin price in the short term.
Over the past few days, Bitcoin price highly fluctuated for the abovementioned reason. On March 19, Bitcoin price declined by 16 percent in one day as the tension between Segregated Witness (SegWit) and Bitcoin Unlimited supporters intensified. As long as support for Bitcoin Unlimited continues to rise as a result of the allocation of hash power from China, Bitcoin price will continue to fluctuate and fail to stabilize.
Second Bitcoin Unlimited bug & patch
Currently, the entire market, including the Bitcoin community, miners, developers and businesses are focused on the development of the block size debate and the progression of Bitcoin Unlimited. An increasing number of miners in China are starting to show their strong support toward Bitcoin Unlimited with the fear that off-chain transactions made by innovative solutions such as Lightning will decrease their revenues.
Although the miner profitability issue was already addressed by experts including BitGo engineer Jameson Lopp, miners in China are still concerned that the reduction of on-chain transactions will lead to lessened miner revenue. This concept emerged due to some of the miners’ failure in understanding that SegWit is, in fact, a real and actual scalability solution which can expand bitcoin block size by up to 3.7 times.
Earlier today, Cointelegraph revealed that the second Bitcoin Unlimited bug was discovered by its developers. As a temporary response, Bitcoin Unlimited developers released a closed-source code in order to prevent the bug from affecting miners and node operators.
The community is worried about a buggy and a faulty piece of software that is being developed by a closed group of developers will be forked and branded as Bitcoin. Lopp also noted that engineers like himself will never attempt to run unstable software as they are responsible for the well-being of their IT system and architecture.
If the hash power in support for Bitcoin Unlimited continues to rise, Bitcoin price will fluctuate intensely in the upcoming days. On the contrary, if the support for Bitcoin Unlimited dwindles due to the emergence of bugs and internal errors, as security and Bitcoin expert Andreas Antonopoulos stated, the probability of Bitcoin Unlimited being forked will be less than 10 percent.