So you've probably heard by now that the large pools have been meeting in secret to discuss a way forward for the bitcoin protocol that would both activate segwit and a future 2MB hard fork. It appears the closed doors meetings did indeed come to an agreement, but not quite what has been assumed by the community.
This is allegedly the draft agreement:
https://pastebin.com/VuCYteJhCopied below:
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 on September 21, 2017
The following companies have committed to provide technical and engineering support to test and support the upgrade software, as well as to assist companies with preparing for the upgrades:
· Bitcoin.com
· BitFury
· BitGo
· Bitmain
· BitPay
· Blockchain
· Bloq
· RSK Labs
· Xapo
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
We welcome all companies, miners, developers and users to join us and help prepare bitcoin for the future
In short, what this actually means is a large proportion of the big mining pools have agreed to ignore pretty much all scaling signalling and adopt their own to further their desires. They plan to do a hard fork within
4 months6 months(updated) that both activates segwit
and creates a base block size increase of 2MB concurrently. In addition, they are NOT going to be using the existing segwit bits, signalling instead their own bit to activate segwit which is
incompatible with the segwit activation from core. They are also planning activation at >80% hashrate.
In essence this means the pools are creating a fork of the current bitcoin code which is planned to be incompatible with any current version should their hard fork go ahead. Which means that every single current code node user, be they core, BU, classic, XT, whatever, is currently going to be on an incompatible fork of bitcoin after their planned deployment in
SeptemberDecember. So they are asking the entire community to ignore all existing bitcoin implementations and adopt their software node implementation before that time, or risk being on a very hashrate poor fork, even though there is no published code to support this
SeptemberDecember fork yet.
This isn't remotely what many of us were expecting when we heard the pools were agreeing to implement segwit provided a hard fork was also available. In retrospect it makes sense given their aggressive stance in the past, but basically this is without doubt the most aggressive stance yet by the mining consortium. It's even more amazing given bitcoin.com allegedly signed the agreement - BU's reference pool implementation owned by Roger Ver. I wonder if all the groups that allegedly signed the agreement are even aware of what it is they're agreeing to? Bitfury for example are in there, who have been vocal proponents of segwit to date.
This will no doubt make the community even more aggressive in response with its BIP148 stance. I don't like BIP148, but I like this even less.
I'd like to believe this draft agreement was heavily revised and is basically wrong, but at this stage this is all we have to go off.
