Likely in a blow to BitMain, a group of mining pool leaders representing approximately 80% of hashing power agreed to activate the Segregated Witness (SegWit) protocol on Bitcoin's blockchain. The group's move is significant given BitMain’s attempt to pursue its own version of Bitcoin that would have given the company nearly complete control over the cryptocurrency. While details of the meeting remain scant, it is clear that BitMain’s blockchain will see little support from other miners and that SegWit will be ready for activation in the coming weeks, perhaps before the 1 August 2017 timeline dictated by the Bitcoin Improvement Process (BIP) 148 proposal. Despite the accord, the future of the cryptocurrency’s governance model remains questionable.
Just two days after BitMain released what can best be described as a takeover of the Bitcoin protocol, the mining community rejected the proposal in unison. At issue was the choice between the two primary, competing scaling solutions: SegWit and larger blocks. Though the vast majority of Bitcoin proponents supported SegWit activation at some point in the future, there was little agreement about when that activation should happen. In conjunction with the Bitcoin Core Developers, Users submitted a BIP that forces miners to activate SegWit by 1 August 2017 or face rejection by Bitcoin Nodes running block validation with the BIP 148 software. While a controversial move, known as the User Activated Soft Fork (UASF), miners were expected to eventually enact the change or face the economic consequences. On 14 June 2017, BitMain, the largest mining pool by hashing power on the Bitcoin network released its own version of the future of Bitcoin, they dubbed it a “contingency plan” to the UASF.
BitMain released a statement that enabled an immediate blocksize increase shortly after the 1 August 2017 UASF activation with some, unknown date, for SegWit activation. The protocol seemed to be in reverse of the so-called “grand compromise” brokered by Barry Silbert at the May 2017 New York Consensus conference that advocated SegWit activation first then a blocksize increase. Needless to say, Users and many Miners were not happy with BitMain’s decision to forsake the Hong Kong Agreement, the New York Agreement also known as SegWit 2X and the UASF. Resultantly, most major representatives of the remaining hash power on the network decided to meet with BitMain.
To be sure, it is unclear as to what exactly was said in the meeting but after the conclusion, which took less than a day, those representing 80% of Bitcoin’s mining hash power agreed to activate SegWit via the SegWit 2X protocol. Importantly, the group did not provide very many details about how it would actually execute signaling for SegWit 2X. This is problematic because even though they agreed that SegWit would be activated, the version of SegWit used for the protocol matters and this was not detailed. Herein lies a small but important problem; will SegWit activate before or after the 1 August 2017 deadline as set out by the UASF? And if it does, under what protocol will that be?
Positively, for the Bitcoin community, a scaling solution has been selected, SegWit, and it will be activated in one way or another over the next 6 weeks. It is unknown how that activation will occur but, it will occur. Nevertheless, as I have written about, the scaling debate is a symptom of Bitcoin’s root cause for strife within the community: a poor governance model. On an earlier SteemIt post, I’ve suggested a method by which to address Bitcoin’s governance problem. I call it the Tetrahedron Model of Bitcoin Governance. Stay tuned for more details because even though SegWit will activate, Bitcoin’s governance debate is far from over.