The world’s most popular digital currency exchange, Coinbase, is under fire from angry customers over its decision not to support a new version of bitcoin that could also make it vulnerable to “ruinous legal trouble,” according to a prominent legal scholar.
Coinbase’s headaches are tied to a breakaway faction of bitcoin miners, who are responsible both for generating new coins and for the software called blockchain that is used to record transactions. On August 1, the miners will implement a software update that will create a so-called “fork” and result in two versions of the bitcoin blockchain—and two forms of the currency as well.
