As the Bitcoin price is surging to new highs above $6900 and crossing $100 billion market valuation, experts are now eyeing on the expected hard fork in the Bitcoin blockchain which is likely to occur within two weeks from now. With the increase in the investor participation, the demand for faster transactions has increased simultaneously. This hard fork aims at increase the block size limit allowing for more and faster transactions to take place on the network.
However, for such a big decision to be implemented, the entire Bitcoin community comprising of developers, miners, users etc have to agree at this. Recently, there has been a large number of international Bitcoin communities that are voicing their opinion against the SegWit2x proposal.
This is basically a non-profit organization with an open membership promoting Bitcoins and similar other technologies. In the last week, the association released a statement emphasizing everyone’s right to fork Bitcoin and create a new cryptocurrency. The statement says:
“A protocol change in the currency holding the name ‘Bitcoin’, especially one requiring a hard fork, requires overwhelming consensus. The SegWit2x hard fork does not in any way enjoy such consensus, and while this remains the case we cannot refer to the resulting currency as ‘Bitcoin.”
Last month during the Bitcoin Meetup at Munich, which comprises of 2000 members, several of them expressed their opinion against the SegWit2x hard fork. The members opposed the SegWit2x proposal owing to some technical concerns and the statement was released through a photo on social media.
“Another doubling of the block size so quickly after SegWit seems hasty and might cause further mining centralization.”
The members argued that the hard fork should have a better preparation and bring more improvements at a time to the table. The group endorses Bitcoin Core as the “True bitcoin client”.
Both these communities were quite sharp in expressing their views against the SegWit2x hard fork. This is the biggest community having several Argentinian and Brazilian companies and users and released the longest statement against the SegWit2x.
The criticism was majorly on the process that led to the SegWit2x agreement:
“The very nature of an ‘agreement’ between a few parties in a decentralized consensus protocol can be interpreted as an aggression against the network.”
The members of this community have also criticised the proponents of SegWit2x for the lack of transparency saying it is more of a “consensus imposition instead of consensus building” and “political compromise instead of a technical upgrade”.
The other issued raised in addition to misleading statements were the rushed nature of the hard fork and the lack of replay protection.
The members of this community were the first to voice the disagreement with the SegWit2x and what it says to be a “staunch opposition to this November’s proposed hardfork.”
This group criticises the very nature of making an agreement for pushing the SegWit2x hard fork. A typical process involving any change to the Bitcoin protocol involves going through the guidelines of Bitcoin Improvement Proposal (BIP) process wherein any proposed change is reviewed by developers across the entire Bitcoin ecosystem. Whereas the decision for the SegWit2x was taken at the invite-only meeting at the New York Agreement between a dozen of company executives.
The Seoul Bitcoin Meetup community writes:
“If a select group of CEOs and investors, no matter how benevolent their intentions, can unilaterally make decisions about the consensus rules without public comment and force these changes upon the network regardless of overall consensus, then Bitcoin will have lost the properties that make it valuable in the first place.”
The Italian bitcoin Community comprise of a group of lobbying groups, meetups, companies and other organisations which issued a statement this week on 31st October against the SegWit2x hard fork.
The major allegation has been put forward by the Italian Blockchain research lab which criticises SegWit2x as “an attempt to perform a political takeover of Bitcoin.”
The detailed statement reads:
“The opposition is especially strong against any action of this kind that could cause huge inconveniences for service providers and serious confusion for users, potentially leading to financial losses: unilateral attempts to appropriate Bitcoin name, logo or “ticker”, attempts to mislead light-clients and SPV wallets on alternative networks not explicitly chosen by them, attempts to launch new coins in a way which leave users vulnerable to “replay attacks” or address format confusion, attempts to attack the network with a temporary hashing-power majority in order to create disruptive reorgs or to slow down the normal activity.”
Both of these major communities agree over the lack of consensus on the hard fork. The Bitcoin Association of Hong-Kong which looks after promoting the digital currency writes :
“The proponents of the hardfork should kindly ask the Bitcoin community to support them and then only proceed with the hardfork if there is widespread community support.”
While on the other hand, the Hong-Kong Bitcoin community comprising a group of Hong-Kong-based companies said: “The lack of enthusiastic support for this fork among the community is striking.”
Both these groups have also voiced against the lack of replay protection in the hard fork saying:
“Due to the combination of both a lack of consensus across the community and a lack of strong replay protection, we consider SegWit2x a reckless endeavor that will cause disruption and harm to the ecosystem”
Voicing their opinions against the SegWit2x hard fork, these communities after being inspired by the Seoul Bitcoin Meetup have created their own change.org petition. The petition has been currently signed by over 1300 people and still counting.
This communities put emphasis on the manner in which the agreement was forged, including the problem for lack of replay protection and other problems.
This petition also has got a call to action to find alternatives for those companies who have supported the SegWit2x hard fork
“We would suggest avoiding the use of services of companies that support the NYA, and we hope to substitute them with alternative solutions.”
Whats your opinion on SegWit 2X?? Comment your views below.
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