Investing.com – Bitcoin fell sharply on Friday as investors appeared to unwind their positions on the popular digital currency while increasing their holdings of bitcoin cash.
On the U.S.-based Bitfinex exchange, bitcoin fell to $6472.3, down $651, or 9.14% well below its recent high of $7895. Bitcoin's market cap fell to 119.96 billion.
Bitcoin added to losses sustained in the previous session falling to its lowest since Nov.1 as traders continued to abandon their bullish bets after it avoided a split in its underlying software.
Developers behind the SegWit2x upgrade announced Wednesday that they were suspending plans for the upgrade, which was slated to activate around November 16.
"Unfortunately, it is clear that we have not built sufficient consensus for a clean blocksize upgrade at this time. Continuing on the current path could divide the community and be a setback to Bitcoin's growth. This was never the goal of Segwit2x," a group of developers said in a note on Wednesday.
The announcement to shelve the upgrade, however, drew disappointment from investors who had expected that the SegWit2x upgrade would have led to the creation of a new cryptocurrency that would have distributed to current holders of bitcoin.
Segwit2x aimed to speed up transactions on the bitcoin network by increasing the size of “blocks” - files that store information on the network - from one megabyte to two megabytes (hence, the 2x).
With bitcoin block size set to remain limited to 1-megabyte – roughly seven transactions per second – many questioned the potential of bitcoin to become a mainstream form of payment as payment processors such as Visa processes about 2,000 per second.
In contrast to bitcoin, bitcoin cash boasts a block size of 8 megabytes with the ability to process transactions at a faster rate.
Bitcoin cash rose 43.19% to $280.34 while bitcoin gold slumped 5% to $159.00.
Ethereum, the second largest cryptocurrencies by market cap, dropped 8.23% to $293.22.