Bitcoin in 2017 has been record setting. Earlier in the year a hard fork occured leading to the creation of Bitcoin Cash. And now the second hardfork of this year has seemingly been avoided.
BTC Versus BCC
The main difference between the two, the size of the “Block” of data in the block chain. Bitcoin Cash was aiming to expand the size of the Bitcoin block from 1 megabytes to 8. Many miners opted to swap towards this new style; but majority stayed true to bitcoin. This hardfork affected investors as well. And thankfully Bitcoin offered exchanges for BCC when this fork occurred.
But then Bitcoin developed a system that allowed more total transactions along the same exact block chain. Its name SegWit.
BTC And Segwit
The Segregated Witness program was established in order to speed up transactions. But how? The blockchain is held together by a Hash; or an equation that directly links the current block to the previous, the SegWit was meant to improve the speed in which the hash was solved. Miners would verify each other’s answer and it would speed up the process of mining blocks. But some programmers decided to take it a step further. And today we have SegWit2x.
BTC and SegWit2x
The platform to use SegWit2x is intended to increase the size of the block size to 2 megabytes. The new platform is intended to be an upgrade from the current system. The past few months were spent gathering data on if the miners would be compatible with the new upgrade, and if companies were even in favor of the new style. At one point the accepted signal even reached 95%. SegWit2x had high hopes for reaching the next step.
Breaking Bitcoin
This past weekend there was a meeting held in Paris named “Breaking Bitcoin”. The conference; ironically held 2 blocks away from the Eiffel Tower, was designated to find security for Bitcoin. SegWit2x found no support at all. The attendees found it dangerous to support the new idea. An offer was proposed before the meeting; make 2 chains. If someone wanted to utilize SegWit2x instead of the current standard, why not let them?
Simply put, it just isn’t the same. The goal of SegWit2x is to NOT create a new chain but to make the new one better. Support for 2X became support for a new slogan, “NO2X”. From the conference meant to “Break Bitcoin” Jimmy Song stated “What doesn’t kill Bitcoin makes it stronger. And conferences like this prove that we are getting better at this.”
The hardfork is seemingly not going to happen. And that truly does make this a NO2X for the forks intending to change what is already great.
