A laconic tweet from an influential Chinese miner may indicate that the year-long confrontation in the community is over. When asked about the issue, HaoBTC’ head Eric Mu declared: “They [developers] won.”

In June, one of the heavy-weight Chinese mining companies HaoBTC released a statement entitled A Call For Core Developers to Clarify Their Stance on 2MB Hard Fork. They requested the Bitcoin Core developers to meet the July 2016 deadline of the 2 Mb hard fork implementation, which had been agreed during the Hong Kong Bitcoin Roundtable Consensus Conference.

At that conference in February, the representatives of the bitcoin industry and development community, coders, miners and major bitcoin companies reached an agreement concerning the timeframe for the blocksize increase implementation. Following the conference, the Consensus Document was released, which reads:

“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.”

In the final section of the document, the developers and miners set the date: “The code for the hard-fork will therefore be available by July 2016.” 

As July approached, the Bitcoin Core developers, in the eyes of the mining community, failed to demonstrate any signs of successful implementation and execution of the hard fork. HaoBTC then filed a public request for an explanation whether the developers were going to meet the deadlines agreed by the representatives of the Bitcoin community and industry:

“Now with June approaching its end and July a few days away, there has been increasing concern whether the Core devs are ready to deliver on their promise, or any effort have been made during the past months towards this end. Some may feel compelled to ask: Were the Core devs who signed the document sincere in their promise or just squeezing the situation for all it’s worth?”

However, this statement of HaoBTC was taken down soon after its release and the company refrained from weighing in on the block size debate since then.

On 27 August, HaoBTC executive Eric Mu eventually responded to bitcoin users on Twitter who inquired about HaoBTC’s call to the core developers and its stance on the block size debate.

@BronxR They won

— Eric Mu (@muxiaoliang) August 28, 2016

He emphasised that Chinese miners do not bother about the 2 Mb blocksize agreement anymore. Those who do are in a minority.

@BronxR Speaking from the perspective of Cn miner, most don't care; the few who do r easily colluded, alienated or cajoled

— Eric Mu (@muxiaoliang) August 28, 2016

Although HaoBTC is yet to offer an official statement regarding the issue, Mu believes that their support of Bitcoin Core is an important part of their commitment to the Hong Kong Bitcoin Rountable Consensus.

Joseph Young