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.

We have often covered the controversies surrounding block size debate, a possible fork on the bitcoin network, and the inability of miners to reach clear consensus in the past. On August 1st, due to the fact that consensus was not reached throughout the network, a hard fork took place, thus separating the bitcoin network as we know it, into two separate versions: Bitcoin Cash and BTC.

To put things better into perspective, until the 1st of August this year, Bitcoin Core and Bitcoin Cash were the same, operating on the very same network as well. The event broke these two digital currencies into 2 separate ledgers, and due to the fact that cryptocurrencies are represented by their own ledger, users woke up to having double the amount: once in BTC and once in BCC.

During the last couple of months, the bitcoin community has been stirring on which ideas should be chosen when it comes down to increasing the blocksize limit. While some believe that the limit should stay as it is, others believe that a gradual increase would be beneficial for the coin, whereas another group of people believe that increasing the block size by a lot, and as soon as possible is essential for the survival of the cryptocurrency.