Another signatory to the New York Agreement (NYA) is having second thoughts about SegWit2x.
Daniel Vogel, co-founder and president of Mexican bitcoin exchange Bitso, sent an email to the SegWit2x mailing list on Thursday expressing hesitancy about the upcoming hard fork that is scheduled to activate in approximately two weeks. Vogel’s chief concern is that although the SegWit2x codebase is written as an upgrade, the hard fork is effectively a blockchain split.
“I would urge everyone to rethink the S2X code from a technical perspective. The code base was written as an upgrade to Bitcoin. I believe there is enough hard data out there to make it clear that S2X is no longer an upgrade.”
He noted that although the majority of the hashrate continues to signal for the hard fork, several pools have either withdrawn support or declined to support it in the first place and others have wavered in their commitment to mine the SegWit2x blockchain.“When do we stop and rethink?,” he asked. “When we get to less than 50% hashing power?”
He also pointed to the fact that no bitcoin liquidity providers — bitcoin exchanges, for instance — have stated they will abandon the incumbent blockchain, which is what happens when a hard fork is truly a blockchain upgrade.
I ultimately think this is about users. We had ZERO users asking us to keep support for the now dead pre-Byzantium [ethereum] chain,” a hard fork that took place last month. “We have tons of users asking us to keep support for their ‘core’ BTC.”
Vogel said that Bitso signed the NYA to help activate SegWit but that the agreement has failed in its attempt to build consensus around SegWit2x.
“What’s relevant is that NYA has failed to bring the community together and provide a safe mechanism to upgrade Bitcoin as it had intended to do,” he continued, adding that “when asked about signing the NYA I definitely didn’t agree to it in order to further divide and cause mayhem, which is what NYA has achieved.”
Bitso is not the first NYA signatory to revoke its support for the agreement. Although SegWit2x project lead Mike Belshe has said “Things are looking good” ahead of the hard fork’s scheduled activation date, a growing list of businesses — as well as mining pool F2Pool — have reversed their support for the contentious hard fork for various reasons, ranging from a lack of replay protection to a dearth of support from their customers and the most active bitcoin developers.
“This is not a blockchain upgrade,” Vogel concluded at the end of his email. “This is a chain split and we are failing to address legitimate safety concerns for the users of this network.”