On October 27, Litecoin creator and former Coinbase executive Charlie Lee revealed that GBMiners, a major mining pool operator, has stopped signaling for the SegWit2x hard fork expected to occur in mid-November.
Lee stated:
GBMiners (~2.5% of total BTC hashrate) stopped signaling for Segwit2x hardfork. First of many pools to realize the folly of this hardfork. 👏 pic.twitter.com/CEioRu2ktj
— Charlie Lee [NO2X] (@SatoshiLite) October 27, 2017
Hashrate Support For SegWit2x is Declining
Earlier this month, F2Pool, another leading mining pool operator with 14 percent of the global bitcoin hashrate, stopped signaling for the SegWit2x hard fork. According to the NYA SegWit2x agreement established at the Consensus 2017 event, F2Pool signed the proposal along with other miners that represent 83.28 percent of global bitcoin hashing power.
With the withdrawal of support from F2Pool and GBMiners, the hashrate support for the SegWit2x hard fork in November has declined from 83.28 percent to around 66 percent. More to that, as Luke Parker of BraveNewCoin stated, many individual miners have started to move from SegWit2x supporting mining pools to Slush Pool, which grants individual miners to express support for either SegWit2x or the original Bitcoin blockchain.
“Further, over 3,000 miners moved from other pools to join the Slush Pool last week, which is the only major pool that lets individual miners decide for themselves which fork they’d like to support. The move saw Slush Pool rise to become the 5th largest pool with 8.5% of the total Bitcoin hashrate — and only 6% of its miners are signaling for Segwit2x, with 75% signaling for the legacy chain,” wrote Parker.
F2Pool’s Hashrate Increases From 9 to 14 Percent
Within one week after withdrawing their support for the SegWit2x hard fork, the hash power of F2Pool increased exponentially, from 9 percent to 14 percent.
Prior to the withdrawal of F2Pool and GBMiners from the SegWit2x agreement, bitcoin communities in major regions and bitcoin markets such as Japan, South Korea, and Hong Kong publicly spoke out against the SegWit2x hard fork. Yesterday, on October 26, CCN reported that the Hong Kong bitcoin community strongly rejected the SegWit2x hard fork, given the lack of support from both the community and the industry.
“SegWit2x does not include strong transaction replay protection, nor does it have widespread consensus across the community. 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. We therefore strongly oppose SegWit2x. This remains true even if the SegWit2x chain has the majority hashrate or a higher price,” the open letter from the Hong Kong bitcoin community read.
At this stage of development, it is likely that the SegWit2x hard fork will pursue and will be executed on November 16. But, given the lack of support from the bitcoin community, mining industry, and the market, the likelihood of the SegWit2x blockchain evolving into the majority chain is slim. Hence, similar to Bitcoin Cash and Bitcoin Gold hard forks, the SegWit2x hard fork will simply lead to the emergence of yet another fork of bitcoin, while the original bitcoin blockchain or legacy chain remains as the majority chain, or “bitcoin.”