Chinese Bitcoin Roundtable Forum Affirms Support For SegWit2X
The Chinese Bitcoin Roundtable Forum has released a statement supporting SegWit2X, a project to provide a minimal patch that could resolve the conflict over activating SegWit and increasing the block size to allow faster bitcoin transactions on the bitcoin blockchain.
The forum wants to implement the special currency New York consensus expansion program resolution.
Resolution Released
In order to solve the bitcoin network congestion, the forum resolved to accelerate the expansion of bitcoin. The meeting on June 15 in Chengdu resolved to do the following:
- Support the New York Consensus SetWit2x program.
- On Monday, June 19, vote to support the program. To avoid using the BIP9 vote to influence the official vote, the gathering will write “NYA” in Coinbase on behalf of the vote.
- Immediately start the New York consensus SegWit2x program 1BTC software test and join testnet5, and release the official version as soon as possible after the release.
- Activate the New York Consensus SegWit2 by July 31.
The companies signing the statement included OKCoin, Huobi, BTCCPool, Bitmain, F2Pool, BTC.Top, ViaBTC, BiXin, BW, 1Hash, Canoe, BATPool and Bitkan.
Community Supports The News
The announcement was met by an outpouring of supportive tweets . Several welcomed the arrival of SegWit.
One tweeter noted ViaBTC is setting itself up to be a centralized HFT exchange where conflict revolves around cable length like the New York Stock Exchange and Nasdaq.
Another commented that it’s great that it’s not all about making money but the future of humanity, adding, “Fight the globalists.”
Another observed that this course of action is the only face saving option at the moment.
Some tweeters did take exception, saying that the miners are taking a leap of faith with SetWit2x.
Also read: Bitcoin Core Dev meets digital currency group; will SegWit activate soon?
SegWit2x Explained
A post on Steemit, a decentralized social media platform that rewards users for delivering commentary, images, videos, and articles to the site, said more than 95% of bitcoin exchanges and mining companies have confirmed support for SegWit2x.
Steemit referenced a March 2017 Linux post that described Segwit2MB as combined soft/hard fork as an explanation.
The post described SegWit2MB as a minimal patch to “untangle the current conflict between different political positions” regarding Segwit activation versus an increase in the on-chain space through increasing the block size. It referred to the solution as “a least common denominator.”
SegWit2MB joins SegWit in Bitcoin 0.14 with a 2MB block size hard fork activated only if SegWit activates, signaled by 95% of miners, at a fixed date in the future. The objective is to reunite the community and prevent the split. It does not intend to be the best technical solution possible to solve bitcoin’s limitations. The proposal does not address future bitcoin scalability or decentralization since a small block size increase has been proven not to affect bitcoin value propositions.
In the worst case, a doubling of the block size has lower economic impact than the last bitcoin halving, which was less than 10%, and succeeded without a problem.
SegWit2MB’s main goal is to be minimalistic. Decisions were made to reduce the number of lines modified in the existing master branch rather than deploying the most elegant solution. The intent is to reduce the time needed for core reviewers and programmers to check the code’s correctness. The patch was created from forking the master bitcoin Core branch and mixing some lines of code from BIP102, and defining a second version mix activation bit for the combined activation.
SegWit would be activated before 2MB, an inevitability since version bits were designed to have fixed activation periods and thresholds. Making 2MB fork and SegWit activate together at a later date would require a major code rewrite, contradicting the premise of a minimalistic patch. Once SegWit activates, the hard fork is unavoidable, according to the Linux post.
Featured image from Shutterstock.
