The biggest story in Bitcoin right now is the potential activation of the long-awaited Segregated Witness (SegWit) improvement by August 1st, but not everyone is excited about the agreement that was signed by various Bitcoin companies that led to this planned activation of the changes.

Some Bitcoin users believe corporate agreements on protocol changes are antithetical to the point of Bitcoin, and Ciphrex CEO and Bitcoin Core contributor Eric Lombrozo recently shared this point of view during a discussion with host Thomas Hunt and Bitcoin developer Jimmy Song on Hunt’s Mad Bitcoins YouTube channel.

Bitcoin Works on Incentives, Not Legal Contracts

From Lombrozo’s perspective, users will react to incentives rather than signed agreements when it comes to changes to Bitcoin’s consensus rules.

“I know that people are sick of like this whole debate or whatever and they want finality, but the thing is that this whole thing works on incentives,” said Lombrozo during his discussion with Hunt and Song. “It doesn’t work on legal contracts; it’s cryptography.”

Lombrozo added that Bitcoin is currently unregulated at the protocol level, and it needs to stay that way.

“At the base layer of the protocol, there shouldn’t be this kind of oligarchic control over this stuff,” said Lombrozo. “It should be an open, peer-reviewed set of standards that people agreed upon that are as unpolitical as possible.”

In addition to his opposition to the New York Agreement (also known as SegWit2x), Lombrozo stated that he was also against the Hong Kong Agreement from early 2016, which included some of his fellow Bitcoin Core contributors.

While Lombrozo noted that he is fine with alternative implementations of the Bitcoin protocol, he clarified that these alternative software clients should not be used to implement contentious, hard-forking changes.

“Once you start to change the rules like this, it doesn’t matter how innocuous it seems, [increasingly the block size via a hard fork] creates a conflict of interest,” said Lombrozo. “That’s going to create some players that want it and some players that don’t. And that automatically creates a division in the community, and that automatically opens an attack vector. It’s not that simple. It’s not as simple as changing a one to a two.”

According to Lombrozo, the various discussions about scaling Bitcoin that take place on social media don’t matter when compared to the structure of incentives that are inherent to the network.

“People are going to run what they’re incentivized to run,” said Lombrozo.

For this reason, Lombrozo does not believe that the hard fork portion of the SegWit2x proposal will succeed. He compared this aspect of the New York Agreement to past attempts at implementing a hard-forking increase to the Bitcoin protocol such as Bitcoin XT, Bitcoin Classic, and Bitcoin Unlimited.

If These Agreements Can Control Bitcoin, Then It’s Uninteresting

In addition to sharing his belief that corporate agreements like SegWit2x are destined to fail, Lombrozo also claimed that a two megabyte hard fork is not something that can be promised in Bitcoin.

“If it were possible to promise that in Bitcoin, it would not be very interesting for many of us,” said Lombrozo. “I think we’d probably want to go work on some other project because, as soon as you start promising that kind of stuff, then I think it loses the most important feature that it has.”

Lombrozo went as far as to say he would rather SegWit not activate on Bitcoin than get it via a corporate agreement like SegWit2x.

“It’s totally missing the point,” Lombrozo continued. “We’re sacrificing the most valuable part of Bitcoin to get [SegWit], but basically, if it weren’t for the real part of Bitcoin that actually gives it the decentralized security, we could use other technology much more efficiently and accomplish much better things than trying to do it this route. So, SegWit doesn’t make sense unless we want to keep this decentralization.”

According to Lombrozo, his distaste for the direction Bitcoin is going in with corporate agreements is at least part of the reason for his support of BIP 148, which is an attempt to activate SegWit on Bitcoin via a user-activated soft fork.

“For me, the risk of a precedent where a closed agreement signed contract is able to change Bitcoin bodes much worse for the future of Bitcoin than the risk of a hard fork,” said Lombrozo.

Still Possible That Bitcoin Could Fail

Although he does not think a contentious hard fork from an alternative software client will be able to do anything other than create an new altcoin, Lombrozo was willing to comment on the possibility that SegWit2x succeeds.

“If the incentives fail, they fail,” said Lombrozo. “If Bitcoin fails because the incentives are not aligned, then that’s the way it goes. It’s a science experiment.”

Lombrozo added that people’s fear of hard forks need to be diminished because, in his view, threats to hard fork from various entities in the Bitcoin ecosystem, such as bitcoin mining company Bitmain, are being used to gain leverage in Bitcoin protocol development. He added that these threats are child’s play to what could be coming to Bitcoin in the future.

“Bitmain is just one company in China,” said Lombrozo. “I mean, there’s entire nation states that are way, way more powerful and even have like armies and stuff out there that may want to attack Bitcoin at some point. How are we going to defend against that? . . . Nation states or more powerful entities could do much nastier stuff. This is nothing. This is a kid’s fight. So, it’s like if we can’t even deal with this, then what’s the point of working on Bitcoin at all?”

Picture from Pixabay.