COMPARED with Brexit, Bitexit seems a piece of cake. On August 1st, without much agonising or awkward negotiations, a group of Bitcoin activists and entrepreneurs managed to create a second version of the crypto-currency. It immediately gained a following: as The Economist went to press, a unit of “Bitcoin Cash” had a price of $460 and tokens worth $7.6bn were in circulation (although that is still much smaller than Bitcoin classic, which stood at about $2,700 and nearly $45bn).

与英国脱欧相比，比特币分家似乎只是小起眼的小事。8月1日，没有太多的痛苦或尴尬的谈判，一群比特币活动人士和创业者创造另一个版本的加密货币，立即取得了一些成绩：截至《经济学人》发稿时，一个单位的“比特币现金”的价格为460美元，共有价值76亿美元的代币流通（虽然这较传统的比特币单价2700美元，总计近450亿美元少得多。）

This “fork”, as such events are called, came earlier than expected. But it is how insiders had expected a two-year-old conflict over the future of Bitcoin to end. At the heart of this “civil war” was the question of how to increase the capacity of the system, which can handle only up to seven transactions per second. The new version is able to process more than 50 per second, but otherwise works much like the original one.

这个被称为“分叉”的事件比预期实施得早。不过这如业内人士所预想的那样，对比特币未来的分歧在经历了二年后结束了。这个“内战”的核心是如何增加系统的容量，因为该系统每秒只能处理七次交易。新版本每秒可以处理超过50个，但在其他方面很像原来的版本。

Will Bitcoin Cash be more than just another “altcoin”, as the many existing clones of the crypto-currency are called? It is backed by Chinese “miners”, firms that provide the computing power to confirm payments and mint new digital coins. They have been unhappy with how the original system has been managed by its developers—and made some further technical tweaks to ensure that the new Bitcoin survives. The followers of the two versions will now fight over which can claim to be the “real” Bitcoin.

比特币现金会只是另一个“山寨币”，像许多现有的加密币的克隆一样吗？它是由中国的“矿工”支持的——这些公司提供计算能力来确认付款和铸造新的数字硬币。他们一直不满意由其开发人员管理的原始系统，并进行了进一步的技术调整，以确保新的比特币幸存下来。这两个版本的追随者现在将争夺声称自己是“真正的”比特币的权利。

More interesting is what the fork might mean for the broader ecosystem of crypto-currencies, of which there are now hundreds. It has long been assumed that crypto-land would be dominated by one currency, Bitcoin, because of network effects: the more existing users it has, the more attractive it becomes to new ones. But Emin Gun Sirer of Cornell University says the split shows that this need not be true. Provided a group of crypto-cognoscenti has the will, the skills and oodles of computing power, it can conjure a new digital currency into existence—and, perhaps, even create value.

更有趣的是，分叉对扩大目现有的数百个加密货币生态系统有意义。长期以来，人们认为加密领域将由一种货币比特币主导，原因是网络效应：现有用户越多，对新用户的吸引力就越大。但康奈尔大学的Emin Gun Sirer表示，这次的分身表明，这个观点不正确。如果存在着一群有意愿，技能和计算能力的密码专家，就能唤起一种新的数字货币的存在，同时有可能，甚至创造价值。

This week’s fork has made Bitcoin holders richer: they get an amount of the new version equal to their holdings of the old sort; and at least for now, both together are worth more than the old one alone. For this reason alone, expect another split in November when the old Bitcoin system may get an upgrade.

本周的分身事件让比特币持有者更富有：他们得到的新版本的数量相当于他们持有的旧股票；至少现在，两者都比旧的更有价值。由于这个原因，预计十一月的旧比特币系统会出现另一次升级。

编译：谢欣璟

审校：陈润琦

编辑：翻吧君

来源：经济学人