The jury has come back with a no verdict for the proposed Segwit2x hard fork and they've officially stuck a fork in it! It was only going to be about 8 more days until the BTC blockchain was scheduled to split and bring loyal BTC investors a new bag of coins at a 1 to 1 ratio to their current holdings.
What was the original point of the fork in the first place?
Well, developers and supporters proposed that the fork would offer a new chain with an increased block size which could create cheaper transaction costs and allow the chain to scale more easily.
The SegWit2x fork should have increased the block size to 2 megabytes. This change could have helped when it comes to bitcoin scalability.
But it has always been a controversial change and many bitcoin companies have not actively supported the move. So many feared that this fork could have split the community into two branches.
I think it is logical to come to the conclusion that splitting the BTC community into two camps could have extremely dangerous repercussions and could end up doing long lasting damage to cryptocurrency markets overall.
“Although we strongly believe in the need for a larger blocksize, there is something we believe is even more important: keeping the community together,” the note says. “Unfortunately, it is clear that we have not built sufficient consensus for a clean blocksize upgrade at this time. Continuing on the current path could divide the community and be a setback to Bitcoin’s growth.”
To me, all this says is that these guys had ambitious plans and they simply weren't strong enough to push this massive fork through in a way that would end up benefiting them and the Bitcoin community as a whole. Messing with BTC ain't as easy as you may think it would be. Even if you are backed by wall street and central banks...
They all met in person earlier this year in New York to agree on this two-part plan. The first part was a bitcoin update called Segregated Witness. This soft fork already happened back in August.
Data is stored differently with segwit in each block. This change improves the transaction capacity of the blockchain. Ultimately the changes that took place in August created a faster and better BTC. Furthermore, the Lightning Network has now been implemented doing even more to benefit the blockchain.
Lightning Network are now also possible thanks to SegWit. Lightning Network is a sidechain implementation that could solve many of bitcoin’s scalability issues. Instead of routing every transaction through the blockchain, transactions between two addresses could happen on a sidechain and you could settle those transactions every now and then with the main blockchain to ease the load.
So what we are left with is one half of a two part plan. We keep the tech upgrades and put the proposed new Segwit2x coin in the bin. I think these guys have made the right choice. As much as some people want to beat BTC at their own game, this just wasn't the way to do it. For all we know this could have caused a civil war and people may have just decided to dump their BTC for fiat or even worse, pick a competitor like Ethereum...
What do you guys think about all this hoopla? Is this a good result to a long and confusing process. Do you think the original idea was a good idea in the first place?
Please leave thoughts and feedback below!
Source:
SegWit2x backers cancel plans for bitcoin hard fork - TechCrunch
