Bitcoin has become increasingly popular in the last few months, perhaps too popular!
At this point, there are more transactions happening on the bitcoin network than it was setup to handle and most experts agree that it needs to scale up. The question is, what is the best way to do it?
This argument has been playing out for years behind the scenes in bitcoin forums and the issues sometimes seem more political than practical. Though bitcoin is borderless and doesn't need to answer to any government, it is controled by a group of sorts.
The miners control the network. Each group of miners, known as a mining pool, controls a certain amount of bitcoin's hashpower. Pools with larger hashpower can control the path somewhat but nobody has enough hashpower to make the decisions. So they'll have to work together to find the final solution.
Here is the High Resolution Image of the flowchart