During the civil war between the two bitcoin communities, a Segwit2x agreement was signed between chinese bitcoin miners and bitcoin companies that was meant to avoid a potential hardfork in the bitcoin blockchain. But since the agreement was so rushed and not planned properly, it was an dead agreement from start.

What is Segwit2x Agreement?

Segwit2x agreement stated that the miners were required to immediately start signalling for the activation of the bitcoin segregated witness upgrade which they had been blocking for over an year and in return the bitcoin companies will make sure that the block size increase demand by the miners will be met. Since the bitcoin core developers weren’t interested in increasing the block sizes, the companies employed Jeff Garzik, a former bitcoin developer, to implement the changes. Jeff Garzik and his team immediately started working on the changes and released the code after a few days which was picked up the miners. This led to a clean activation of the segregated witness on the bitcoin blockchain but forced a 90 day hard fork in the bitcoin blockchain to increase the block sizes.

Violations of the Segwit2x Agreement

The Segwit2x agreement was immediately violated by ViaBTC who released their own fork of the bitcoin blockchain with the release of Bitcoin Cash(BCH). This was immediately listed by several exchanges in China and Japan. Soon after the release of Bitcoin Cash, several miners including Antpool, BW Pool, BTC.top etc. that were the major participants of the agreement began mining Bitcoin Cash which some can call as a violation of the agreement. Bitcoin Cash created several problems for the bitcoin blockchain as the hashrate from bitcoin mining moved to Bitcoin Cash leading to slow block generation and higher fees on Bitcoin.

The Segwit2x agreement suffered another blow when a company Bitwala, who were previously a supporter of the agreement, released a press release in which they stated that in an event of hard fork on the bitcoin blockchain, the company will stick to the bitcoin core blockchain and not the segwit2x chain which was completely against the agreement.

Another member of the Segwit2x agreement, F2Pool, stepped down from the agreement stating the their part of the deal was only valid till July and they never ran the segwit2x code. This was welcomed by the bitcoin community with praise and also provided encouragement to other participants to step down from the agreement which was already violated by the chinese miners.

The bitcoin core developer group, that was completely ignored during this agreement, recently announced 0.15 version of the bitcoin client which will completely ban the nodes running segwit2x code from the network which also clearly shows that they still have no intention of supporting the Segwit2x code. This client is still being tested out and isn’t released yet.

Conclusion

Since the agreement was done between the bitcoin companies and bitcoin miners leaving Bitcoin developers completely out of the loop, it was never going to succeed. With SlushPool still not sure about the agreement, the expected backlash from several other participants of the agreement and the bitcoin developers completely banning the segwit2x nodes, it looks dead for now.

The participants of the agreement still have 2 months left for the hard fork that was planted into their system by this agreement which has to be taken care of or the participants will be forked of from the bitcoin network and will face several issues.

Let us know in the comments how you feel about this agreement and what went wrong.