The New York Agreement (NYA) lost another signatory on Tuesday, as Latin American bitcoin exchange SurBTC withdrew support for SegWit2x a month before its scheduled release.
The Chilean startup made the announcement on Tuesday in an official blog post, joining a litany of companies that have begun to withdraw support for SegWit2x as the scheduled November date for the controversial hard fork approaches.
In the post, the company explained that they “always loved SegWit” and thought that increasing the block size to 2mb was a “good idea” when they were invited to sign the New York Agreement in May. However, now that SegWit has been activated on the Bitcoin network, SurBTC has decided to withdraw its support from SegWit2x, citing Bitcoin Core’s firm opposition to the scaling proposal.
From the statement:
“We don’t believe in trying to force a change bitcoin’s core developers don’t feel safe with. The technical background of the team that currently collaborates on the core bitcoin project has an unprecedented level, we believe them to be, at least as a group, unbiased experts who deserve at least a voice on the subject.”
Although SurBTC supports “moderately larger blocks,” they state that they believe it is irresponsible to push through this change without the support of a majority of bitcoin’s core developers.
“Even though we would be happy to have moderately larger blocks to accommodate growing demand, we feel that Bitcoin needs (at least a majority) of bitcoin’s core developers’ support in order to do this responsibly. We haven’t seen this support and we don’t like what we currently see on the btc1 code repository in terms of technical considerations and open source collaboration.”
The exchange added that it will allow its customers to withdraw “B2X” if the fork does happen, and they may add it to their trading platform in the future. However, it will not be labeled as “Bitcoin” or “BTC”.
SurBTC’s official withdrawal of support comes just one day before Bitcoin.org is scheduled to publicly denounce prominent cryptocurrency companies that refuse to rescind their support for the hard fork or at least commit to treating the SegWit2x blockchain like an altcoin. Although SurBTC did not directly reference the threat, it was one of the companies Bitcoin.org had called out by name.