Hello fellow steemians,
As you may know, the whole bitcoin network has been quite agitaded in the past few weeks. Quick recap: bitcoin has become so successful, it has encountered some scalability issues. To address these issues, two concepts have been proposed:
- increase the block size from 1MB to 2MB - very roughly speaking, the solution that most miners would want
- Segwit, which in layman's term allows you to put more transactions in a block by reducing the size of the transactions (this is done by removing the signature data from the transactions)- the prefered option for some, mostly users.
The combination of the two concepts is called Segwit2x.
Sadly, even after months and months of discussion, the different parties involved didn't manage to reach consensus. Indeed, Segwit needs 95% of the miners to signal it before implementation, but this has not happened yet. This led to the famous ultimatum of a User Activated Soft Fork (UASF, or BIP-148). Basically, on August 1st, user nodes will start refusing blocks from miners that do not signal Segwit readiness, with the idea of forcing miners to signal for Segwit and to reach that 95% required. This deadline has led to a lot of uncertainty, since this would lead to a chain split, and unstability in the transactions.
BIP-91 To the rescue!
BIP-91 is a protocol signalled by miners, that is currently on the verge of being implemented. It is a protocol that proposes both Segwit2x AND BIP-148. This means: Segwit signalling, 2MB block size 3 months after segwit implementation, and every block not signalling segwit will be refused. Basically, if implemented before July 29th, BIP-91 will "override" BIP-148. For this protocol to be implemented, 80% of the next 336 blocks need to be signalled with BIP-91. And guess what: it's happening!
https://coin.dance/blocks
Now as you can see it isn't done yet, 269 blocks are needed, thus 63 block are still needed as of right now. A great amount of mining pools have signalled for BIP-91. In the last 24hours, 83.3% of the total blocks have signalled BIP-91. This makes it extremely likely that the 269 block mark will be reached, since only 63 blocks out of the next 84 are needed (63/84=75%).
Why this is important
This is the turning point for the bitcoin community on many levels. First, a consensus has finally been found between the users, and more than 80% of the mining hashrate. It reduces incertainty as to what will happen, since BIT-148 is garanteed to be backed by more than 80% of the miners. Miners that will resist Segwit will be outnumbered in terms of Hashrate power, and will be refused by BIP-148 users: a fork is still possible, but the security of the BIP-148 blockchain will be garanteed.
Second, this may set a precedent in the future negociations about Bitcoin development. It took more than a year to finally reach some kind of consensus between most of the miners and the users. It is pretty clear that without the BIP148 ultimatum from the users, the problem of scalability would've continued for months! It is defintely possible that in the future, more ultimatums of the sort will be needed to apply pressure on miners who refuse to implement changes.