According to Coin.dance, 903 of last 1000 blocks are signaling support for Segwit2x and therefore BIP 91 is activated following the consensus mechanism. Market shows positive feedback to the news as the price soared to around 19,800 CNY from 16,200 and stands 18,800 at press time. However, viewers should be aware that the activation of BIP 91 might not be the end of civil war.
The achievement doesn’t come easy if you look at the historical chart of Segwit2X. Only 5 out 1,000 blocks signaled support for “Segwit2X” on 17th June.
SegWit2X Blocks History (source: coin.dance)
There must be some stories behind these numbers.
A thread on 8btc forum titled: miners who don’t want lose money are advised to withdraw from F2pool, tells the story happened around F2pool. Btcnightcat, COO of F2pool, condemned the DDOS attack to the pool’s ETH mining service from 14th to 19th July. As for the reason for such attack, Jiang Zhuoer guessed it would be related to rivals who operate GPU mining pools.
“The DDOS to F2pool is very likely the mutual attack between GPU mining pools. First the target is on ETH/ZEC, later expanded to other coins. Vote for SW2X has already started long before 14th July and therefore the attack is not related to SW2X.”
Jiang also revealed screenshot of blackmail, which is believed from the DDOS attacker. The attacker claimed to be a top whitehat organization and the attack was a result of “many previous warning went un-responded”. The mail demanded F2pool to lower PPS fee and stopped “draining benefits from miners”.
Email believed to be from DDOS attacker
On another reply to the thread, btcnightcat said F2pool could have deployed support for Segwit2X later if not for handling the attack.
It seems that mining business has become so lucrative in China that competition is inevitable.
Jiang Zhuoer, operator of #2 Bitcoin mining pool, called the chain-split warning by the Core team is “ill-intentioned”. He summarized some major BTC price movement since 2015 and said:
“Anyone who has some knowledge about the scaling should know that the Segwit2X will be locked in for sure. With ill intention, Core has released a chain-split warning without mentioning the widely-accepted New York Consensus and the support of NYA from China mining industry. It’s Many newbies are frightened. I don’t know how many newbies give up their BTC during the recent price drop.”
Jiang is known for supporting onchain scaling or “Bitcoin Unlimited”. With the activation of BIP91, Bitcoin network manage to mitigate an imminent risk. Is the civil war ended? It might not be true. As a Core supporter, 007 Longshao said on weibo:
“Everyone is happy. Both CORE gang and 2M gang believed that they won. Roger is the only person who is sad because he believed that it was activation of BIP 91 instead of Segwit2X and 2M might not be implemented. Therefore he withdrew support for SW2X. 2M (scaling) might not be happened after 3 month. But who cares, SW is activated anyway, let Roger die! LOL!”
BIP91 is just the first step to activating SegWit on the network, not to mention the 2M scaling. We shall wait and see if the “Segwit” and “2M” could be implemented eventually.