Bitcoin Core developers haven’t expressed their support for SegWit2x, the proposal to activate Segregated Witness (SegWit) at an 80 percent activation threshold by September and execute a 2 MB block size increase hard fork six months thereafter.
On June 9, Barry Silbert, the founder and CEO of Digital Currency Group (DCG), which recently led 57 companies to establish the Bitcoin Scaling Agreement or the SegWit2x agreement, stated:
“Super pleased with the progress to date on SegWit2x and, more importantly, thrilled to see increasing level of collaboration with core developers.”
However, according to the publicly available “SegWit support” column on Bitcoin Wiki shared by Bitcoin trader and consultant Tone Vays, not a single Bitcoin Core developer has approved or announced their involvement in the development of the SegWit2x proposal.
Evaluating, deciding or declining
Only two Bitcoin Core developers, Eric Lombrozo and Jorge Timon, are currently evaluating the SegWit2x proposal and others have either rejected the proposal introduced by the 58 companies participating in the Bitcoin Scaling Agreement or have not yet decided whether to support it or decline the proposal.
So far, Eric Lombrozo is the only developer who has publicly stated that he will continue to collaborate with Silbert, DCG and the other 57 companies that represent 83.28 percent of hashing power and $ 5.1 bln monthly on-chain transaction volume.
On May 27, Lombrozo vowed to help Silbert and make DCG’s initiative a success in order to resolve conflicts amongst developers, businesses and miners to solve Bitcoin’s current scaling issues. Lombrozo, the Bitcoin Core development team, the industry and the mining community unanimously agree that the scaling issue needs to be addressed because, ultimately, users are suffering from the increasing fees and growing fee market.
Scaling solution needs to be activated urgently
Recently, the recommended fees on prominent Bitcoin wallet platforms such as Xapo and Blockchain, as well as Bitcoin fee estimators including 21 Inc’s Bitcoin Fees, surpassed the $3 mark. In fact, 21 Inc’s Bitcoin Fees suggests that the fastest and cheapest transaction fee is currently 480 satoshis/byte, which would result in a fee of $3, considering the median Bitcoin transaction size of 226 bytes.
It has become quite evident that a scaling solution needs to be activated urgently in order to lessen the fees and allow users to utilize Bitcoin as a digital currency. Some major exchanges such as Kraken have begun to charge users over $7 as a withdrawal fee due to the rapidly rising Bitcoin transaction fee and the fee market.
It is possible that the DCG, Barry Silbert and the 57 other companies listed on the Bitcoin Scaling Agreement are making actual progress with Bitcoin Core developers and are trying to make their initiative a success.
Over the past few weeks, the Bitcoin community has seen more progress in Bitcoin scaling than it did in the past few months. Developers have started to collaborate with businesses and miners to ensure Bitcoin receives the ideal scaling solution for both short and long-term scalability.