For months, the bitcoin community has been anxiously awaiting a code change that aims to fix how slow and expensive the cryptocurrency has become since it's gotten more popular. Early on Thursday morning, the code change—called Segregated Witness—finally kicked in.

Segregated Witness, or segwit, is the culmination of a long-running "civil war" within the bitcoin community over how to speed up the network. However, not everyone agrees it's the best path forward and one group has already split off from bitcoin proper with their own solution, called bitcoin cash.

For two years now, developers, users, and various companies have been sparring about how to prepare bitcoin for more users. In 2015, it became clear that the "blocks" of transaction data that get added to bitcoin's public ledger were filling up, meaning that during high-traffic periods, many transactions can go unconfirmed for hours or even days.