Today brings good news, Bitcoin BIP91 SegWit implementation locked in at a following block:

Community seems to be happy about this and price of BTC is reflecting this (currently at $2700+). We have avoided major blockchain split on August 1st, but the road ahead is still not 100% solid for Bitcoin, here is what happens next now that we reached this milestone:

Rejection of non-SegWit blocks

At approximately block #477119 BIP91 community will start rejecting blocks that are not signalling SegWit.

BIP148 Activation / big companies pausing activity

This is still set to happen on August 1st, however is no longer viable as SegWit is already supported. However big companies like Coinbase are issuing warnings (around 31st July-1st August) about temporarily pausing activity relating to Bitcoin transactions until they feel confident that scaling has resolved properly.

SegWit2x 2mb hard fork

There is no concrete date for this, but we should see hard fork within next 4–6 months to increase block sizes to 8mb and / enables 2mb non-segwit capacity per block.

SegWit2x hard fork acceptance

Some time after hard fork will be set, by which 100% of miner support needs to be reached in order to avoid chain split. If all goes well 2mb hard fork will activate, if not we will have 2 chains current and 2mb one.

Alternative Bitcoin chains

There are still proposals of hard forking into alternative Bitcoin chains like Bitcoin Unlimited that are set to happen despite successful SegWit lock in. However it doesn’t look like they will reach support needed to become successful.

~SC

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