The Bitcoin/Bitcoin Cash fork went smoothly, SegWit locked in this week, and the Bitcoin price is hitting record highs. All that's left now is the doubling of the blocksize this fall, SegWit2X will be complete. The miners and the core developers will hold hands and sing kumbaya and we'll all be rich, right? Everything is smooth sailing from this point on, right? Well...not so fast. November could still see an ugly showdown.
The SegWit2X client is supposed to hardfork around November, doubling its base size from 1MB to 2MB to create a total capacity of 3.4MB (in combination with SegWit), rather than the 1.7MB that SegWit provides on its own. Sounds good, but a recent announcement by Bitcoin Core developers warns that the new Bitcoin Core client will “immediately disconnect peers” (nodes) that use the segwit2x BTC1 client. Does this mean that, having received what they wanted with the lock-in of SegWit, they plan to retreat on their promise to increase the blocksize? This seems to be what Bitcoin Cash supporters anticipated, and the reason they split the chain on August 1st 2017. If that happens, miners who support the larger blocksize might go ahead and launch the hard fork anyway, resulting in BTC-SegWit and Bitcoin Cash (the two chains we have today), and a third coin - “BTC-SegWit2x.”