After a meeting in Hong Kong’s Cyberport on 21 February, representatives of the bitcoin industry and development community agreed to implement the SegWit in April and activate a hard-fork solution by July 2017.
According to the press release published by Medium, the participants of the meeting, representing almost 80% of the network’s hash power, as well as a number of largest exchanges and bitcoin core developers, came to the following conclusions:
“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.”
As the document states, if proved successful, the soft fork will be followed by a hard-fork solution to be developed and activated within 15 months after the first upgrade:
“If there is strong community support, the hard-fork activation will likely happen around July 2017.”
The document is signed by the leading members of the industry, including AntPool, XBT, BitFury, BitX, BTCC, Coinfloor, F2Pool, Genesis, Huobi, Ledger, OkCoin and others.
Meanwhile critics are already voicing their discontent with what they see as serious flaws in the new proposal. Thus, Brian Armstrong, co-founder and CEO of Coinbase exchange, who recently backed Bitcoin Classic hard fork, is concerned about the fact that in three months the agreement proposes “less than doubling” of the block capacity by means of SegWit. The next capacity increase is expected no earlier than in a year and a half from now, which seems way too late taking into account the actual growth rate of bitcoin transactions. Moreover, according to Armstrong, in its current form the agreement “reinforces the idea that bitcoin protocol development should be done by a single group,” instead of a decentralised multi-party system where developers compete to improve the protocol while the industry chooses best solutions by voting.
Elena Platonova
