TRIGGER ALERT
This post may offend you...
Let me start by saying that this blog will sound like I am “For” SegWit2X. I am not, but I AM against all the bullshit that surrounds this debate. This blog will touch on some truths that seem to get drowned out and buried within this debate.
So a lot of newbies are confused about all the "forking" and drama surrounding bitcoin and its forks. Just the other day, on the 24th of October, a fork occurred and Bitcoin Gold was "created". Bitcoin Gold is NOT the Segwit2x upgrade! A lot of people do know this, but a lot of people I have found out do not. Bitcoin Gold runs on the equihash algorithm so is ASIC resistant, includes segwit, and pretty much follows the same principles of Bitcoin (21 million cap, block times, etc...). This version is meant to bring "decentralization" back to bitcoin by taking the power away from the large mining "cartels" or pools that control Bitcoin with ASIC machines and making Bitcoin GPU mineable again.
That last part most people shilling for "NO2X" on twitter and reddit do not understand. Bitcoin technically is centrally controlled currently. There are 4 pools that control over 51% of the mining power. If they decide to work together they could technically control the network. NO2X shills like to spread FUD that somehow through a 2MB upgrade that it instills "centralized control" of Bitcoin. This is not true. Bitcoin is already being centrally controlled and it will be regardless of the upgrade or not. People against the 2X upgrade claim corporations are trying to highjack bitcoin. This again is false (disagree if you want, you won't change my outlook). These businesses handle the wallets and transactions of most every day users. The every day user wants what these companies signed in agreement to implement, larger blocks. What does this equate to? Faster transactions and lower fees.
Now, I will say that the people spearheading the 2X movement cannot be trusted. They are big bankers. There is someone who works for the world bank as well as another member who sits on the board for the New York Federal Reserve... obviously this is a conflict with the very existence of Bitcoin. The problem is on one side we have BlockStream, looking to use Bitcoin to push their sidechain solutions, and on the other team is the big bankers. Both in my opinion are bad for bitcoin, and quite frankly I personally believe Adam Beck would fully cooperate with the banksters in the future regardless of this outcome. I believe this due to him helping coordinate the NYA.
What I am going to say next is very controversial and again, you will not change my mind on it (I know, much of what I already said is controversial). I have been watching and participating in Bitcoin for some time now. Some of you who will read this have been in it longer, but I can guarantee that most who read this are "newer" to this space.
I have been censored on r/bitcoin and blocked by Samson Mow and other members of BlockStream on twitter simply for challenging their agenda with questions that prove their narrative false. This is unknown to many, but Blockstream and the core devs who believe in segwit being "the way" (as well as their followers) do not see Bitcoin for what it was intended to be. They want Bitcoin to be the equivalent of Gold in the real world. Heavy, slow, and costly to transact... pretty much the opposite of what was originally mapped out by Satoshi Nakamoto in his white paper for Bitcoin. Bitcoin in its simplest form is supposed to be a "peer to peer cashless payment system"... not a "store of crypto value".
Blockstream needs Segwit and bitcoin blocks to stay small so they can implement their side chain technology and the lightning network. If anyone uses twitter you will see that Charlie Lee is extremely vocal about his want for Bitcoin to stay in its current state and not upgrade to larger blocks... I wonder why that is? Possibly due to his coin and project being completely useless if bitcoin could transact faster and have lower fees... the things that would happen by increasing the block size currently. I ACTUALLY USE bitcoin. I use it as much as I can for commerce. Over the past 5-6 months though it has been nothing but a headache. Bitcoin is extremely costly (I was almost charged $100.00 to send less than $3,000.00) and it is slow to transact. It wasn't always that way, but the blocks have been full now leaving people like myself to use a currency that is widely accepted on the internet where bitcoin is and faster. Guess which coin that is... you got it, Litecoin. Is this starting to make sense yet? Seem like a conspiracy at all yet?
Litecoin is known as Bitcoin's silver. lighter, faster, cheaper to transact. Read that again... is there any use for a coin that does the same thing as Bitcoin but faster and cheaper if Bitcoin transacted faster and cheaper? No, there isn't. It just becomes another clone with no use case scenario. Yes Litecoin is working on "atomic swaps" where you can transfer coins from one block chain to another, but besides Bitcoin, the other coins it does this with are technically shit coins (you can agree or disagree, it's my opinion). "Segwit Bitcoin" needs the lightning network, and Litecoin needs Bitcoin to be slow and costly for it to be relevant... seems to make sense why they are working together to make people think that somehow Bitcoin would be destroyed by implementing larger blocks.
People claim the NYA (New York Agreement) was a backroom closed door deal just between businesses. That is what you will hear from a NO2X shills. What they love to leave out is that the core team and developers were invited, but decided they didn't want to show up. There are I believe a couple core developers that actually did sign this agreement as well. The other thing to note is that this agreement was already made once before but The Core team didn't hold up their agreement to implement the changes. They made this agreement in Hong Kong in February of 2016. The agreement went as follows:
"On February 21st, 2016, representatives from the bitcoin industry and members of the development community have agreed on the following points:
-We understand that SegWit continues to be developed actively as a soft-fork and is likely to proceed towards release over the next two months, as originally scheduled.
-We will continue to work with the entire Bitcoin protocol development community to develop, in public, a safe hard-fork based on the improvements in SegWit. The Bitcoin Core contributors present at the Bitcoin Roundtable will have an implementation of such a hard-fork available as a recommendation to Bitcoin Core within three months after the release of SegWit.
-This hard-fork is expected to include features which are currently being discussed within technical communities, including an increase in the non-witness data to be around 2 MB, with the total size no more than 4 MB, and will only be adopted with broad support across the entire Bitcoin community.
-We will run a SegWit release in production by the time such a hard-fork is released in a version of Bitcoin Core.
We will only run Bitcoin Core-compatible consensus systems, eventually containing both SegWit and the hard-fork, in production, for the foreseeable future.
-We are committed to scaling technologies which use block space more efficiently, such as Schnorr multisig.
Based on the above points, the timeline will likely follow the below dates.
-SegWit is expected to be released in April 2016.
-The code for the hard-fork will therefore be available by July 2016.
-If there is strong community support, the hard-fork activation will likely happen around July 2017.
Now take a look at all who were in agreement a year and a half ago... before the collusion began (in my opinion).
Kevin Pan
Manager
AntPool
Anatoly Legkodymov
CEO
A-XBT
Larry Salibra
Bitcoin Association Hong Kong
Leonhard Weese
Bitcoin Association Hong Kong
Cory Fields
Bitcoin Core Contributor
Johnson Lau
Bitcoin Core Contributor
Luke Dashjr
Bitcoin Core Contributor
Matt Corallo
Bitcoin Core Contributor
Peter Todd
Bitcoin Core Contributor
Kang Xie
Bitcoin Roundtable
Phil Potter
Chief Strategy Officer
Bitfinex
Valery Vavilov
CEO
BitFury
Alex Petrov
CIO
BitFury
Jihan Wu
Co-CEO
Bitmain
Micree Zhan
Co-CEO
Bitmain
James Hilliard
Pool/Farm Admin
BitmainWarranty
Yoshi Goto
CEO
BitmainWarranty
Alex Shultz
CEO
BIT-X Exchange
Han Solo
CEO
Blockcloud
Adam Back
President
Blockstream
Bobby Lee
CEO
BTCC
Samson Mow
COO
BTCC
Robin Yao
CTO
BW
Obi Nwosu
Managing Director
Coinfloor
Mark Lamb
Founder
Coinfloor
Wang Chun
Admin
F2Pool
Marco Streng
CEO
Genesis Mining
Marco Krohn
CFO
Genesis Mining
Oleksandr Lutskevych
CEO
GHash.IO & CEX.IO
Wu Gang
CEO
HaoBTC
Leon Li
CEO
Huobi
Zhang Jian
Vice President
Huobi
Eric Larchevêque
CEO
Ledger
Jack Liao
CEO
LIGHTNINGASIC & BitExchange
Star Xu
CEO
OKCoin
Jack Liu
Head of International
OKCoin
Guy Corem
CEO
Spondoolies-Tech
Pindar Wong
Sponsor "
Now that you see who agreed, many core contributors, head of block stream, and some of the biggest business heads in the bitcoin business. What changed? The NYA is the same agreement that was made in Hong Kong. The difference is that the NYA was made due to the developers of block stream and bitcoin core not following through and implementing the upgrades that were agreed upon. The business heads involved in Bitcoin decided to meet again, invited the devs, and the devs didn't show. Why would that be? I personally don't know, but my guess is the want to work on the technology they had began working on; side chain technology and lightning network integration. Some say this is a good idea and fine, I personally don't think so. Bitcoin was meant to be cheap and easy to use, not to use as something to retain value and hold up other projects by having faults. I am not a "Bitcoin maximalist". There are TONS of crypto's I support and HODL that I feel have real world use case's. I don't agree though with intentionally leaving Bitcoin, the king of crypto coins, to be weak just to help another coin. Below is a list of the signers and terms of the NYA for reference.
"We agree to immediately support the following parallel upgrades to the bitcoin protocol, which will be deployed simultaneously and based on the original Segwit2Mb proposal:
-Activate Segregated Witness at an 80% threshold, signaling at bit 4
-Activate a 2 MB hard fork within six months
-We are also committed to the research and development of technical mechanisms to improve signaling in the bitcoin community, as well as to put in place communication tools, in order to more closely coordinate with ecosystem participants in the design, integration, and deployment of safe solutions that increase bitcoin capacity.
-We welcome all companies, miners, developers, and users to join us and help prepare bitcoin for the future.
The group of signed companies represents a critical mass of the bitcoin ecosystem.
As of May 25, this group represented:
58 companies located in 22 countries
83.28% of hashing power
5.1 billion USD monthly on chain transaction volume
20.5 million bitcoin wallets
Separately, as of May 24, the following companies have committed to provide technical and engineering support to test and support the upgrade software, as well as to assist companies with preparing for the upgrades:
Abra|BitClub Network|Bitcoin.com|BitFury|BitGo|Bitmain|BitPay Blockchain|Bloq|BTCC|Circle|Ledger|RSK Labs|Xapo
Supporters as of May 25:
1Hash (China)
Abra (United States)
ANX (Hong Kong)
Bitangel.com /Chandler Guo (China)
BitClub Network (Hong Kong)
Bitcoin.com (St. Kitts & Nevis)
Bitex (Argentina)
bitFlyer (Japan)
Bitfury (United States)
Bitmain (China)
BitPay (United States)
BitPesa (Kenya)
BitOasis (United Arab Emirates)
Bitso (Mexico)
Bitwala (Germany)
Bixin.com (China)
Blockchain (UK)
Bloq (United States)
btc.com (China)
BTCC (China)
BTC.TOP (China)
BTER.com (China)
Circle (United States)
Civic (United States)
Coinbase (United States)
Coins.ph (Phillipines)
CryptoFacilities (UK)
Decentral (Canada)
Digital Currency Group (United States)
F2Pool (China)
Filament (United States)
Gavin Andresen (United States)
Genesis Global Trading (United States)
Genesis Mining (Hong Kong)
GoCoin (Isle of Man)
Grayscale Investments (United States)
Guy Corem (Israel)
Jaxx (Canada)
Korbit (South Korea)
Luno (Singapore)
MONI (Finland)
Netki (United States)
OB1 (United States)
Purse (United States)
Ripio (Argentina)
Safello (Sweden)
SFOX (United States)
ShapeShift (Switzerland)
surBTC (Chile)
Unocoin (India)
Vaultoro (Germany)
Veem (United States)
ViaBTC (China)
Wayniloans (Argentina)
Xapo (United States)
Yours (United States) "
So as you see, this wasn't some backroom deal made by a few, it was made by those that the general public trust as their means to store and transact their Bitcoin. In my opinion, they want what the general users want, to be able to use Bitcoin as the currency it was originally intended. It isn't a currency for just the rich, or just cypherpunks. It was meant to free the people of the world from the constraints of central banks and monetary inflation. I shouldn't have to out of convenience trade my Bitcoin for Litecoin just to transact quickly when Bitcoin has the capability to do so.
The last thing I want to mention is the replay attack FUD. Yes replay protection should be used if you are forking from a coins main chain... if you are an alt coin. That is where the big issue comes in here. B2X does not see itself as an alt coin, it sees itself as the real Bitcoin due to the agreed upon terms for the upgrade. The reason it is a contentious fork in the first place is due to the HKA not being implemented as agreed upon. In the "2Xer's" eyes they see it as BTC1 being the fork you could say and their upgrade being the agreed upon plan. So why would they "Bow down" and integrate technology that technically says that they are a different coin? Because both "camps" think they are the "real" bitcoin (and currently the Segwit1x version IS considered the real Bitcoin) neither want to integrate replay protection. The "original" chain says they don't need it because they ARE Bitcoin, and the upgraded 2MB chain says they aren't implementing it because they ARE Bitcoin. The fact now is because of this you "could" double spend your coins... anyone this happens to though I honestly think deserves it. The only way your coins are getting double spent is if you don't know what you are doing, and in that case, crypto isn't for you.
In the end, and in a perfect world, we would all just get along. We would upgrade together for the greater good of all. I personally feel as if Blockstream is doing things not for the good of all, but for the good of making it a business. Many of you will disagree with my view points, I as a miner am with the "Big Blockers" and believe an upgrade to 2MB is necessary. I think anyone who uses Bitcoin regularly would also agree with that statement. I'm not against any camp necessarily, but I can say that I feel the camp that is ruining Bitcoin is the one that is censoring people who speak about a decentralized currency in a way they don't agree with. Hopefully by this time next year we will be only ONE successful Bitcoin.
Regardless of which side is victorious those of us staying aware and paying attention will capitalize, make money, and continue to HODL. It sucks that the community is so torn, but its growing pains. It happens with every business and every team. I do believe eventually we will all come to consensus to make Bitcoin the best version of itself.
