Bitcoin adds to gains as rival Bitcoin Cash crashes 40%

Investing.com – Bitcoin added to gains on Friday, as the novelty of its rival Bitcoin Cash wore off, halting fears that the newly created cryptocurrency would prize away market participants from bitcoin.

On the U.S.-based Bitfinex exchange, bitcoin rose to $2,846.2, up $55.3 or 1.98%.

Bitcoin was on track to notch a weekly gain, in what has been a tumultuous week for the world’s most popular currency, after its blockchain – the digital ledger which records every bitcoin transaction – split into two, creating a competing currency called Bitcoin Cash.

After an initial surge, Bitcoin Cash appears to have lost its lustre among investors, falling more than 40% to $208.50 on Friday.

Bitcoin Cash, was created as a result of a ‘civil war’ in Bitcoin, after some members of the bitcoin community rejected software upgrade SegWit2x – a popular proposal aimed at speeding up transactions on the bitcoin network – on the back of concerns that SegWit2x fails to adequately address bitcoin’s scaling problem.

Bitcoin transactions are limited to 1-megabyte every 10 minutes - or seven transactions per second. This compares to 2,000 per second for Visa and means that at peak times bitcoin transactions can take hours to be fulfilled, inhibiting the currency.

Bitcoin Cash seeks to increase the block size to eight megabytes whereas SegWit2X proposes moving transaction data outside of the block on a parallel track with plans to increase bitcoin’s block size later in the year.

Meanwhile, Ethereum, rose to $220.93, down 1.64%.