All of the new people seeking access to Bitcoin have run up against a limit on the number of transactions that can flow through the system every 10 minutes, which was put in place during Bitcoin’s early years.

Because of the limit, the network can process only around five transactions a second. That has led to delays on the network and has pushed up the price of getting a Bitcoin transaction through.

Companies that help process Bitcoin payments have been pushing to lift the limit on Bitcoin transactions for several years, arguing that it will be necessary if Bitcoin wants to compete with Visa or PayPal.

The opposing camp has argued that quickly expanding the number of transactions flowing through the network would mean only large companies could track Bitcoin transactions, taking power away from individual users.

The proponents of keeping the so-called blocks of Bitcoin transactions small said Bitcoin should be viewed more as digital gold: a secure place to keep money, even if it can’t be moved around as quickly and cheaply.

Many of the programmers working on the basic Bitcoin software — the so-called core developers — said they would stop working on Bitcoin if the block size was increased.

They also complained that the companies pushing through the block size increase were doing so without properly consulting the community.