Bitcoin Rivals Multiply Amid Battle for Crypto Dominance

New iterations of the cryptocurrency are multiplying as disagreements over bitcoin’s design persist and opportunities for making a quick buck prove hard to pass up, according to Bloomberg.

The biggest offshoot, called bitcoin cash, appeared in August after it split from the bitcoin blockchain in a so-called hard fork. That spinoff, currently valued at almost $18 billion, was followed by a less successful fork to create bitcoin gold in October, while a major spinoff that was planned for this week, stemming from an upgrade of the bitcoin technology called SegWit2x, was suspended. Now, several other splits are being planned.

There’s bitcoin diamond, bitcoin silver, bitcoin unlimited and super bitcoin, the latest proposal to emerge. But that’s not all, there’s also bitcoin platinum and bitcoin uranium, whose descriptions in Reddit posts looks suspiciously similar, and the uranium version carries the unfortunate ticker of BUM.

The proliferation of bitcoin breakup plans highlights the double-edged sword of the cryptocurrency’s decentralized design; it allows for experimentation where ultimately the market will pick each coin’s value and use, but it can also get confusing and messy for users. The software underpinning bitcoin is open source, meaning anyone can simply copy it and make adjustments to form a new version of the coin if they have issues with the original. There’s also a profit motive: if offshoots are successful, the creators can earn windfalls by “pre-mining“ coins for themselves or foundations they control.

Each cryptocurrency that breaks off from the main bitcoin chain aims to solve a problem the developers believe bitcoin has. In the case of bitcoin gold, it’s the centralization in mining that results from the amount of power and specialized hardware required to mine bitcoin. Bitcoin gold tries to solve this by allowing the cryptocurrency to mined with any gaming graphic card. In bitcoin cash, the aim is to increase the block size to 8 megabytes from 1 in the bitcoin blockchain, to speed up transactions and reduce fees.

The appeal of creating a bitcoin fork rather than a new cryptocurrency is that the spin-offs gain access to bitcoin’s user base, as well as brand recognition. When coins split from the main chain, bitcoin investors get the equivalent of their holdings in the new coin. This has caused bitcoin to rally ahead of hard-forks, as traders anticipate what feels like free money.

The question for the crypto community, which includes a growing number of Wall Street banks and fund managers, is how fractured bitcoin will become. The popularity of bitcoin cash, along with talk of other offshoots, has fueled big price swings over the past two weeks as traders struggled to gauge which cryptocurrency will come out on top.

Despite the turbulence, bitcoin still has a commanding lead in the crypto league tables. Its $124 billion market value is at least four times larger than any of its competitors, which include hundreds of “alt-coins“ like ethereum and monero, according to Coinmarketcap.com. But bitcoin’s top-dog status is far from guaranteed, given the ongoing feuds among its many stakeholders.