All major Chinese Bitcoin exchanges announce pre-plan for the potential fork of the multi-billion dollar network. Most will suspend Bitcoin withdrawal and deposit around the potential forking time and promise to distribute forked assets to users if there is any. Users are advised not to send or receive BTC around 1 August. Some exchange may even rollback trading data in extreme cases.

Debate for bitcoin scaling has been brewing since 2013, when the topic was officially raised by the development team raised during the bubble. The network congestion reached its peak in Q1 and Q2 2017 while most community members have picked their side between “Segwit” and “Bitcoin Unlimited”. Situation has changed dramatically after the New York conference, where most mining pools agree to launch the “Segwitx2”, or “Segwit first, 2M later” scaling proposal.

According to BTC.com, almost all mining pools are signalling support for “NYA” and 80% for “Segwitx2” at press time, which is in line with BTCC’s announcement:

Most mining pools signalling support for NYA. source:btc.com

“BTCC fully supports the New York Agreement (BTC1). The New York Agreement already has more than 80 percent of the network’s hashing power, and we hope that the community will reach consensus around this implementation of the bitcoin software.”

The “Big 3” bitcoin exchanges in China released similar statement regarding the potential fork. Huobi hinted listing of all forked coins if there is any.

“If Bitcoin is split into several blockchains, Huobi will for every blockchain give users their rightful ownership of their digital assets. Once the potential Bitcoin forks happen, Huobi will take steps to support trading for every type of Bitcoin.” “If you need to trade any type of Bitcoins, please deposit Bitcoin in advance. “

OKCoin, or OKEX, tweeted the announcement, saying:

“To serve the best interests of every one of our customers, OKCoin will support all competing forms of Bitcoin.”

The fork seems to be scary but it might not happen as predicted by Jiangzhuoer, owner of #2 mining pool BTC.TOP in March.He insisted that Bitcoin might not split like Ethereum. He said in the end the market would determine the fate of minority chain.

1. The minority fork of BTC needs to burn 200 million Yuan to survive.

2. The mining industry has the motive, determination and ability to kill the minority fork.

3. If necessary, the mining industry will adopt a more moderate transition method.

4. Change POW = ostrich policy, change the POS algorithm = Taiwan to give up the seats in the United Nations.

5. Essentially the market, not the mining industry, decides to kill the minority fork.

Some major altcoin exchanges and service providers also release statement on the potential fork. Btc38 says the exchange will list all forked digital assets gradually.

“If there is price abnormality during the forking process, BTC38 may adopt the following (but not limited to) measures: suspension or rollback of trading. “

Viabtc seems to be the most progressive one by listing “Bitcoin Cash” or BCC trade pair and cloud mining tract. Bitpie, the bitcoin wallet developed by Bither team, will shut down all service of the mobile wallet (send, deposit and p2p trading) at 11PM 30th July. But they didn’t mention the disposal of forked assets or replay attack.

The multi-billion network upgrade also attracts mainstream media attention. The report by Beijing Business News is quite informative. JS Caijing released a feature page for the scaling upgrade.