At BitGo, we always put safety and consideration of our customers first. Preserving value for you is our first order of business, regardless of how on-chain capacity unfolds.

Scaling Bitcoin is hard. It’s contentious, complicated, difficult to test, and time-consuming. Today, we’re nearing the culmination of nearly 3 years of hard work to complete the final stage of Segwit2x and activate the 2MB blocksize increase. Surprisingly, some are arguing against this capacity upgrade due to how the process has worked. I think they’re being short sighted.

The current capacity of Bitcoin is obviously too low. Everyone in the Bitcoin community wants Bitcoin to reach more people. Today, Bitcoin reaches somewhere around 15–25 million people. Whether that number is accurate is irrelevant — we know that we’re orders of magnitudes away from reaching the billions of people that could benefit from Bitcoin. It is clear that Bitcoin needs to grow massively in order to reach those who need it most. Blocks today are already full. Even if layer-2 solutions someday provide off-chain scaling, larger blocks will still benefit everyone, and that technology is available now. We must not inhibit growth for an uncertain future. The current Segwit2x solution is safe, preserves Bitcoin’s monetary rules, and maintains the network’s strong decentralized properties.

If we don’t activate the 2MB increase now, there are literally no capacity upgrades in the queue to ship within 12 months. In fact, the next set of promising solutions (Schnorr, signature aggregation, etc) aren’t even coded yet, and we know from experience that capacity upgrades take years. We don’t want to be in a reactive position again with no on-chain capacity — Segwit2x is an opportunity to take proactive measures to increase the capacity now, and avoid the out-of-space disaster that we know will arrive in 6 to 24 months.

Finally, as we take on this upgrade, we need to remember that 2MB is still not close to enough. We’ll likely need dozens to hundreds of additional capacity increases going forward. The developers of Bitcoin are truly heroes making Bitcoin possible for so many people. But because the time to deploy these changes is so lengthy, we need to establish a steady-stream of significant capacity increases into the development cycle and adopt a path toward continuous, safe improvement. Done properly, in the 3–5 year time horizon, we’ll have a healthy pipeline of new improvements that preserve the ethos of Bitcoin while also enabling growth to bring Bitcoin to everyone.