Concerns about Bitcoin’s ability to scale began arising several years ago. As more people began using BTC, transactions took longer and longer to process. To address some of the issues surrounding scalability, a technology called Segregated Witness (SegWit) was added to Bitcoin. SegWit moved signature verification to an extended block so that each block could be processed faster.
However, some of the developers and miners associated with BTC didn’t think that SegWit was the right approach. Instead, they created their own protocol using Bitcoin blockchain technology and increased the block size. This resulted in transactions that were processed faster at a reduced cost. Developers also didn’t like the lack of transparency involved in the adoption of SegWit technology and thought that creating a hard fork would lead to greater decentralization and democratization of the currency.
In the end, the idea was to improve scalability while also following the vision laid out by blockchain pioneer Satoshi Nakamoto, the anonymous party behind a whitepaper that kicked off the age of cryptocurrencies. The future of Bitcoin is still a matter of debate. Bitcoin Cash’s hard fork, Bitcoin SV, is gaining some popularity.