Lots of interesting things going on with Bitcoin at the moment. Because I realize not everyone on Steemit is into crypto. I'll try to make this write-up as easy to understand as I can.
The block size for Bitcoin has been a problem for a while. It's not big enough (1MB) to fit in all the transactions that users want to make.
Therefore there is a huge backlog of transactions waiting for a block increasing the transaction times. Making the whole system slow.
(You can compare it to a train station where a train arrives every 10 minutes and has not enough wagons for all the passengers to get in. But new passengers are arriving all the time. Before you know it you have a line outside the station.)
For miners, this is actually great news because now users need to add a big fee with their transaction to get in front of the line and get their transaction go through. It's a good extra source of income for miners but bad for users.
It's been tried before to increase the block size but consensus could never be found. Therefore we are still stuck with 1MB blocks.
Some users got so sick of this they decided to take matters into their own hand. They want to force a decision by implementing a UASF (User activated soft fork).
What they will do is basically only accept blocks from miners that signal with their mined blocks that they support Segwit. Segwit is the term used for a block size increase. Blocks from miners that don't signal support for Segwit will be ignored. This UASF will happen August 1st.
source: coindesk.com
This UASF made Miners and Bitcoin companies a little bit scared. So they agreed to meet in New York to talk about it. They decided to implement Segwit on their own terms so they came up with Segwit2X and they want to implement it before August 1st. Preventing all that UASF Stuff and god knows what all those users might come up with.
The current support for Segwit2X is 88.2% amongst miners. If the support is higher than 80% on July 21st. It will lock in and activate 2 weeks later.
3 months after that it will be hard-forked into the blockchain on November 1st. With hopefully 100% miner support.
Scenarios and opinions
Everybody has an opinion about what is right and wrong with Bitcoin at the moment. Some say Bitcoin should never increase it's block size and should become a store of value instead of a usable coin for small transactions. They say that even with 2MB blocks it's still so outdated. (10 minutes transaction time vs 3 seconds with STEEM for instance).
But it's also the most popular crypto and if users and companies have to work with it, it would be beneficial for the whole crypto space if it at least works without delay.
My personal biggest fear about this whole Segwit2x is that if it fails we will end up with 2 different Bitcoins (or more). It will cause major confusion in the markets about which is the real one. I'm also not too happy about the rush at wich this Segwit2x is being implemented because of the UASF fears.
I hope they checked the code.
Interesting times ahead! That's forsure.
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