Bitcoin Software Addition 'SegWit' Could Make Digital Currency Faster The Bitcoin community is ready to roll out an enhancement to the digital currency's code base; SegWit (which stands for "Segregated Witness") separates the encrypting of the transaction information from the currency miner's validation signature; currency miners need extensive computing resources and time to prove that a transaction is true and valid, therefore this step has traditionally slowed down the recording of transactions; done with testing, the new SegWit feature could be released as soon as November 15th; it is considered officially adopted once 95% of the Bitcoin software community deploys the code; this could take as little as a month or two, or significantly longer.

Starting August 1 at about 8:20 AM EST, the bitcoin blockchain split, and there is a new set of tokens - bitcoin cash (BCC)  - on the new blockchain; bitcoin's price dropped about 10% from $2,944 to $2,632 in about forty minutes, according to bitcoin trading platform OKCoin. Source (Chinese)