Growing interest in Bitcoin as a rational payment system online has created a surge in number of bitcoin transactions happening worldwide. As a result, it is getting harder to fit these into the 1MB blocks that gets created every 10 minutes, Sathvik Vishwanath said.
"The next logical thing is for bitcoin to scale up -- among many proposals is SegWit, which has seen clear majority and will be attempted on 1st of August. It is likely to be successful," Vishwanath added. "The exact side effects if things do not go as per the plan are still unknown."
In simple words, various solutions have been suggested and the crypto-community has been at loggerheads to decide on one. For certain software updates to happen on bitcoin, there needs to be a consensus among miners (by hash power) to implement it.
If miners don't reach a consensus by August 1, there will be a hard fork, which will split blockchain, leading to the formation of two currencies.