Bitcoin.org followed through on its threat to publicly denounce companies that support the SegWit2x hard fork and have not committed to classifying the competing blockchains as separate cryptocurrencies following the resulting chain split.
Last Thursday, Bitcoin.org — an open-source repository for bitcoin resources and information and the top Google search result for “Bitcoin” — published a blog post threatening to publicly denounce 50 prominent SegWit2x supporters unless they would revoke their support for the controversial scaling proposal or agree to treat the SegWit2x blockchain as an altcoin.
Today, they followed through on that threat, posting a banner site-wide banner that warns of “Bitcoin’s possible incompatibility with some major services”.
The banner links to a blog post that criticizes SegWit2x and the companies that support it. The post claims that SegWit2x supporters will shift their users to an altcoin that is incompatible with the true Bitcoin network. It warns readers to avoid storing their BTC holdings with services that support the hard fork.
From the post:
“The signatories of this agreement wrongly believe that the currency created by adopting this contentious hard fork will eventually become Bitcoin,” the post states. “Therefore storing any BTC on services such as Coinbase, Bitpay and Xapo is strongly not recommended.”
The post goes on to criticize SegWit2x proponents for pushing through a “rushed and hasty upgrade which has only minority community support and has been thoroughly rejected by users and the technical community.” Consequently, Bitcoin.org pledges that it will not recommend wallets, exchanges, or other services that have “exited the Bitcoin ecosystem in a contentious manner”:
As this new altcoin is not Bitcoin, Bitcoin.org will not list wallets and services that present this altcoin as “Bitcoin” or “BTC” to their users after the hard fork. These services have exited the Bitcoin system in a contentious manner and therefore are no longer useful to our visitors.
Finally, the post lists the names of 48 SegWit2x-supporting companies it believes bitcoin users should avoid. The list includes many prominent companies, including Coinbase, ShapeShift, BitPay, and Xapo. Several companies named in the post last week — including Chilean bitcoin exchange SurBTC — revoked their support for SegWit2x and were not called out in today’s warning.
Unsurprisingly, SegWit2x supporters have criticized the domain owners of Bitcoin.org for using the website to denounce the hard fork. ShapeShift CEO Erik Voorhees, for instance, called the move “highly political.”