It has been confirmed that the Bitcoin network market will avoid this month’s Segwit2x hard fork, due to the insufficient consensus. The currency responded with a new all-time high, reaching approximately $7,900 USD per unit. The Segregated Witness protocol would have activated the 2 MB block size increase, which was already triggered in August by a vast majority of miners.
Mike Belshe, CEO at Bitgo, published a post in which he confirmed the fork’s cancellation and explained that keeping the community together is far more important than the need for a larger blocksize. Lead developer of the protocol, Jeff Garzik, revealed on his mailing list that the team didn’t make the agreement. Further demands on the upgrade would only represent a setback to BTC’s growth, which is quite opposite from what the community wants to achieve.
Following these announcements, forums and social media erupted with different opinions and conspiracy theories. Cryptocurrency advocates like Peter Todd and Charlie Shrem literally set the internet on fire after stating that millions of dollars were spent only to end up as a complete engineering mess.
With current increase in value and Bitcoin’s constant growth, the on-chain capacity expansion is necessary, as sudden fluctuations of the currency have shown. The price surged $500 USD in less than an hour, after the protocol was cancelled, establishing a price range between $7,700 and $7,900!
On the other side, the supporters of BCH had a different viewpoint; promotion of bitcoin cash or tricking market participants that Segwit has been implemented. Stephen Pair, CEO of Bitpay, asked miners in written form to cancel the forking efforts, as they could “rip the blockchain apart”. It remains to see whether it’s all over, since most people believe that the aftermath has just begun.
Source:
“Breaking News: Segwit2x Fork Cancelled”, Samuel Haig, news.bitcoin.com, November 8, 2017.