Bitcoin Expansion Is Off the Table. At Least for Now.

A visitor taking a picture of a monitor at an exchange for virtual currencies in Seoul, South Korea. Advocates of expanding the Bitcoin network’s capacity backed down on Wednesday to avoid a split in the Bitcoin community.

SAN FRANCISCO — A long-running civil war over the design of Bitcoin appears to be over for now, after one side in the fight acknowledged on Wednesday that it had not won sufficient support from other virtual currency backers.

The camp that conceded had been hoping to double the number of transactions that could be run through the network that supports Bitcoin, in order to keep transactions cheap and fast.

This expansion was vociferously opposed by many of the programmers working on the Bitcoin project, who worried that expanding the network quickly would make it easier for a company or government to exert influence over the decentralized system.

The group pushing for expansion had planned to switch to a new version of the Bitcoin software next week, which would have created a split in the network and most likely wreaked havoc on the virtual currency.

This planned split, though, was called off on Wednesday, after the companies proposing it failed to win significant support from the Bitcoin community.

In an email, the leaders of several of the largest Bitcoin companies said that “unfortunately, it is clear that we have not built sufficient consensus for a clean block size upgrade at this time.”

The price of Bitcoin shot up immediately after the email went out, hitting a new high, above $7,800, before retreating. The price has been steadily climbing and is up nearly 1,000 percent over the last year.

The rising price has attracted many new users, from places like Japan and South Korea and from big hedge funds, even as the authorities in places like China have cracked down on the currency.