Over the last week, the price of Bitcoin crashed from around $2,400 to $1,800 on fears of a so-called hard fork, which is to say the digital currency would effectively split in two due to software upgrades at the end of the month that would create competing marketplaces.
Potential and actual forks have roiled cryptocurrency prices regularly since the introduction of Bitcoin in 2009. The problem with most reporting of these events is that it treats cryptocurrencies as different from physical currencies, and a fork as a complicated technological disaster.
Read Full Article »