A group of developers coding under the banner "Bitcoin Classic," which makes up less than 1% of bitcoin nodes, will no longer provide support for the alternative software, claiming another protocol is achieving what they set out to do.
Speaking in a blog post, release manager for Bitcoin Classic, Tom Zander, said today that, given the suspension of the Segwit2x hard fork this week, he believes bitcoin's scaling problem will continue, and that the functionality of bitcoin cash will likely surpass that of bitcoin.
Zander wrote:
"In at most six months I'm sure we'll just drop the 'Cash' and call it 'Bitcoin'."
Initiated in 2016, Bitcoin Classic's stated goal was to increase bitcoin's transaction capacity by raising the block size from 1MB to 2MB, however, it failed to gain traction among the cryptocurrency's global software users. While at one point, more than 2,000 Bitcoin Classic nodes comprised nearly one-third of the network, today less than 1 percent of network users run the software.
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Earlier this week, the team behind controversial scaling proposal Segwit2x said it will not proceed due to a lack of consensus surrounding the hard fork.
Due to this decision, Zander wrote that the those behind the so-called "legacy chain" (his term for the bitcoin blockchain), "would rather go down with their ship" than upgrade the software to keep up with the rising numbers of transactions.
As such, he said, Classic will cease operations "in a matter of days or weeks," urging all miners and nodes currently supporting the network to immediately migrate to an alternative.
Earlier this year, bitcoin activated a scaling solution called SegWit, which increases transaction quantity without raising the block size, and paves the way for future off-chain scaling solutions. However, the impact this has had on the network has so far been minimal, leading some to criticize the software.
While this has been attributed to a lack of adoption in the industry, Zander states that bitcoin's failure to increase the block size limit merely "confirms the Cash chain's viability." With this perspective, Zander joins others in predicting that bitcoin cash will flourish following the Segwit2x cancellation.
He concluded that regarding the future of bitcoin, "the market will decide."