Now, there are two different bitcoin implementations—the original, and a new one called Bitcoin Cash—to suit two very different ideas about how the technology can scale up to handle worldwide adoption. Bitcoin proper is changing how data is bundled to reduce network congestion, and Bitcoin Cash enlarged the size of data blocks to a max of eight megabytes (up from bitcoin's one). It's exactly the kind of entertaining bullshit bitcoin observers have come to expect from the virtual currency, and it's tempting to focus on the split as bitcoin's main event.

But if you take a step back, bitcoin also had some surprising recent victories that bode well for its future.

The thing about a "hard fork," the technical term for splitting bitcoin, is that it's actually pretty easy to do. You don't need the whole bitcoin community or even a significant fraction of it to support you in order to fork, you mostly just have to write some code. Code is easy, but people are hard. People have beliefs, material investments, and worse—egos. When the bitcoin "scaling debate" kicked off in 2015, a hard fork was a looming prospect from the jump. And in a system that is itself a form of self-fulfilling prophecy, as soon as it was spoken, it was virtually guaranteed to occur.