A scaling agreement was reached today that clarifies the course ahead for Bitcoin's next wave of growth and dominance as a means of stored value, and gives stability to Bitcoin's future in the eyes of the massively growing community of investors, adopters, dabblers, interested parties and skeptics alike.
56 different companies, who collectively represent 83.28% of Bitcoin's hashing power, agreed on a plan that will fix both the highly debated scaling issue associated with bitcoin and the present backlog of transactions and slow transaction speed as the result.
The Digital Currency Group announced today that:
We agree to immediately support the following parallel upgrades to the bitcoin protocol, which will be deployed simultaneously and based on the original Segwit2Mb proposal
- Activate Segregated Witness at an 80% threshold, signaling at bit 4
- Activate a 2 MB hard fork within six months
We are also committed to the research and development of technical mechanisms to improve signaling in the bitcoin community, as well as to put in place communication tools, in order to more closely coordinate with ecosystem participants in the design, integration, and deployment of safe solutions that increase bitcoin capacity.”
Furthermore, other companies such as BitPay, Bitmain, Bloq, Circle and Xapo have agreed to provide ‘technical and engineering support’ to help and assist the testing of the SegWit2mb protocol upgrade.
The Digital Currency Group was also quoted stating:
“The group of signed companies represents a critical mass of the bitcoin ecosystem. As of May 23, this group represents:
- 56 companies located in 21 countries
- 83.28% of hashing power
- 5.1 billion USD monthly on chain transaction volume
- 20.5 million bitcoin wallets”
