Bitcoin went into crisis mode early this morning. This time, the threat wasn't from hackers tampering with poorly secured virtual wallets. It was Bitcoin's own code that was causing the trouble.

A compatibility issue between the two most recent versions of the cryptocurrency's core software has resulted in a split in the Bitcoin blockchain, causing the currency to grow in two different directions at once. What does this mean? The biggest problem that two competing Bitcoin chains could breed is someone trying to spend the same coins on each chain. Bitcoin was explicitly designed to resolve such an occurrence—called "double spending"—and the mere possibility has thrown the validity of some recent Bitcoin transactions into question.
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