During the last couple of months, Bitcoin has gone through a two different hard forks, and the creation of two additional and separate digital currencies – bitcoin cash and bitcoin gold. Now, the deadline is quickly approaching for another hard fork, and this will likely have larger implications for the network.

The plan to introduce SegWit2x has been around since May, and has quickly gained favour with numerous mining pools and bitcoin start-ups. While the number of those supporting the hard fork has changed over the last few months, we’ll attempt to explain what this protocol change wishes to achieve, and the means of doing so.

While the Bitcoin community has been debating whether to issue a hard fork for a while now, to reduce the blocksize, the Ethereum network has taken the step forward and carried out the long-debated and anticipated fork on the blockchain.

A couple of hours ago, the China-based Ethereum miner known by the name of BW.com managed to mine the 192,000th block on the Ethereum blockchain. Just a few seconds afterwards, the mining pool also mined the first block on the new version of the blockchain, thus returning the funds that were lost during the collapse of The DAO project.