It seems like we can’t go a month in bitcoin without a hard fork. There’s even talk of another one in December called Bitcoin Silver, but we’ll save that for another day.
SegWit2x is the second part of the New York Agreement made at the Consensus Conference this past May. The first part, implementing SegWit, went through on August 1. Now we have the second part, the hard fork to upgrade the block size to 2MB, coming at block 494,784, which should be on November 16.
This one is not as clear cut as Bitcoin Cash (BCH) or Bitcoin Gold (BTG). In those cases it was well-known that we’d end up with two coins and bitcoin would remain BTC.
SegWit2x is a bit different. The original plan was for SegWit2x to make the changes necessary to help bitcoin scale. It was never supposed to end up as two coins.
The problem of course is that the 2MB upgrade has become a contentious debate. On the one hand many miners and corporations support SegWit2x. On the other hand the core developers and many node operators do not support SegWit2x, viewing it as too risky.
Despite the controversy, Bloq co-founder and lead developer of SegWit2x, Jeff Garzik, says SegWit2x is full steam ahead.
It could play out in a number of ways. If SegWit2x doesn’t get any support there may not even be a B2X coin and we’ll just continue with BTC. If SegWit2x gets full support than everyone would move over to the SegWit2x chain and that would become BTC.
The most likely outcome, however, is that we end up with two coins. I don’t see how we avoid this as the groups are not close at all at reaching a consensus. That’s unlikely to change in the next couple of weeks.
So how to prepare? The general advice is to hold your BTC where you control the private keys, suspend trading activity around the hard fork, and keep your eye on the news to see how it settles out.
For more specifics check out this article and this article which go over some of the major bitcoin services and how they’ll be handling SegWit2x.
Personally, when the dust settles I think legacy bitcoin, BTC, will remain on top and B2X will be just another altcoin.
What do you think?