“Up until now a lot of people didn’t really believe bitcoin could go any higher until the scaling issue is resolved,” said Arthur Hayes, Hong Kong-based founder of bitcoin exchange BitMEX. “With this actually being implemented on protocol, theoretically the amount of transactions that can be processed at a reasonable speed is going to be much higher, so a lot of people are very bullish about bitcoin now.” Because of a cap on the amount of data processed by bitcoin’s blockchain, transactions started to slow as its popularity boomed. The community was then divided between the SegWit2x solution backed by a group of developers and another supported by miners that sought a larger increase in the block size. The latter then became Bitcoin Cash.

http://fortune.com/2017/08/14/bitcoin-price-record-speed/