As you may have heard some companies in the bitcoin ecosystem entered into an agreement to hard fork the bitcoin network into a bigger block size, a project known as Segwit2x or the New York Agreement (NYA).
This endeavour has faced widespread opposition in the bitcoin community; users, traders, developers almost in unison, and a significant share of companies have come out against it.
There are many reasons to oppose this and they have already been discussed at length at social media. Some that we feel strongly about are
- A hard fork has never been done on bitcoin before, and this seems like an extremely risky way of doing one, the absence of replay protection being a main reason
- The vast majority of the smartest people in the field, including most of the developers of the Bitcoin Core client strongly advise against it
- If a contentious fork would succeed it would set a terrible precedent about the mutability of the bitcoin protocol.
- There is even a philosophical point: The fact that no entity or group of entities control Bitcoin is what gives it the “permissionless” property. This property is the reason that no Bitcoin company is held responsible or liable for activities on the Bitcoin network as a whole.
While many opponents to this fork will not support it in any way, the proponents in most cases state that they will support both chains.
At the time of writing (Oct 24th) it is clear that the new fork will create a new currency, referred to as “B2X”, and that the currency currently known as Bitcoin will remain known as Bitcoin.
We urge those considering to participate in the split to reconsider their position. The stated goal of the NYA was to unify the bitcoin community. It is evident now that it’s leading to the opposite of that, and that the best thing for everyone would be if this split just didn’t happen. We believe that there is still a reasonable possibility for this outcome and this is the one we would prefer.
How we will deal with a split
If there is in fact a split, we will handle this in a similar way to how we handled Bitcoin Cash.
During the split we will not shut down operations, we will continue running 24/7 and continue processing bitcoin transactions based on our full nodes, currently running Bitcoin Core 0.15.
There is a possibility of reduced mining rate (and slower confirmations) during a period directly after the split. For such an eventuality we advise our users to refill their balances ahead of time. The split happens at block, 494,784 which is estimated to November 16th.
For users who hold a balance on a Bitrefill account, we will snapshot the balances at the time of the split, and if/when it becomes reasonably safe to do so we will sell the B2X coin, distributing the proceeds pro rata to the users. This way our users can be sure that they will receive the full value of their deposits.
Of course we will gladly help you to withdraw the funds if you so wish, and if you want to voice concerns please do that in a comment, on our subreddit, twitter, or by email to support@bitrefill.com
We have off-chain integrations in place with some companies that signed the NYA. If there are any problems with the integrations we may temporarily disable them, and will work to reenable them as soon as possible for our users — we will communicate more about that around the time of the potential split when we have more information.
Closing note
As one of the leading bitcoin merchants, dealing primarily with low-value transactions and emerging economies we will continue to do what we can to improve the service for our users. Even a hypothetical non-contentious 2x hard fork wouldn’t solve the issues we do have. We will continue working on things like off-chain integrations, Layer-2 solutions, and improved support for altcoins.
The bitcoin ecosystem has in the last months spent a great effort on supporting multiple coins; building coin splitting, replay protection, coin withdrawals, and writing company statements like this one. We would have preferred this effort be spent on rolling out real scaling improvements like segwit and into researching payment channels and the plethora of privacy-enhancing scaling improvements we’ve been reading about.
We hope that after this has passed we can all go back to building those things to create amazing bitcoin experiences for our users.
