One of the largest Chinese mining pools is ready to withdraw its support for the bitcoin roadmap due to the change of one participant's position title. Bitcoin users are guessing what could cause this decision.

The representatives of F2Pool request an explanation from Adam Back, President of Blockstream, why “at the very last moment” he allegedly changed his official title from “president” to “individual” in the signature under the Roundtable roadmap published on 21 February.

“We feel we’ve been cheated. I don’t know how we can trust Blockstream anymore in the future,” said the Chinese miners in their announcement.

Reddit users discussing the issue suggest Back's action may imply that during the roundtable he was representing only a personal opinion on the roadmap rather than the whole company's official position.

This interpretation was confirmed by another company representative. Blockstream co-founder Mark Friedenbach wrote in the Reddit trend:

“Thankfully we at Blockstream are given the freedom to speak and act as individuals on this matter. Even Adam is attending as an individual, his signature not carrying the weight of representing Blockstream in this instance.”

Nevertheless, later the position title of Adam Back was changed back to “President”, yet without any explanation.

“Perhaps next time the contract should be hashed and the hash stored in some decentralized immutable ledger,” suggested (with tongue in cheek) a Bitcointalk forum user.

On 21 February, the majority of bitcoin industry leaders together with many Bitcoin Core developers agreed to implement the SegWit in April and activate a hard-fork solution by July 2017.

Elena Platonova