If you’ve been around the cryptocurrency space in the last year or so, you had to notice the insane fees on Bitcoin around December and January. Bitcoin’s adoption has been growing along its price and so the amount of transactions done per day has been going up. There was a point where a day’s worth of transaction costs in USD reached 22 Million dollars. For perspective, it currently averages at 200 thousand dollars, that’s about 99% less.

Now while Bitcoin’s price and the cryptocurrency bear market had a toll on that, last year we saw a massive effort by the Bitcoin community to drive up the number of transactions per second the blockchain could handle. To achieve this goal two strategies were proposed, one of them was Bitcoin Core’s effort introducing SegWit, short for Segregated Witness, which was activated by a user activated soft fork (UASF), and the other was Bitcoin Cash’s user activated hard fork . To further explain this we need to touch on simple basic Bitcoin blockchain technical details.