2X fork suspended, can Bitcoin breathe a sigh of relief?

The 2X fork, originally scheduled for mid-November, has been suspended, and the news came very suddenly.

After months of debate, a group of businesses and mining companies supporting alternative versions of Bitcoin software have abruptly abandoned their efforts.

And those who had been opposing the proposal for months were visibly elated after seeing the news.

“Segwit2x hard fork is canceled! Common sense prevailed,” Litecoin founder Charlie Lee loudly expressed his opinion.

“One more fork and Bitcoin is done,” wrote Andreas Antonopoulos.

Akin Fernandez, a staunch opponent of the Segwit2x proposal, posted a short tweet:

“Bitcoin wins.”

In fact, those who oppose the Segwit2x proposal have previously joined a long-awaited protest movement called "NO2X". They add the prefix "NO2X" to their social media usernames.

These behaviors have already begun to appear after the Segwit2x announcement in May.

An open source software requires different stakeholders to agree on its operating rules, and the major Bitcoin companies, developers and mining pools have different views on how Bitcoin should be developed and updated.

The failure of 2X can be seen as the culmination of the scaling debate that began in 2015, when Bitcoin maintainer Gavin Andresen proposed that Bitcoin needed to expand its block size. Since then, the community has made several attempts to expand the block size.

However, despite initially gaining support from stakeholders, 2X ultimately joined bitcoin classic, bitcoin unlimited, and bitcoin-xt in failing to gain majority support.

Unexpected abandonment

“I’m glad it’s over,” said Guy Corem, a miner who signed the Segwit2x agreement in May. “It’s the right thing to do.”

Others have suggested that ‘NO2X’ supporters are out to defeat 2x through tactics. Members of the group are often criticized for making disparaging comments and launching attacks against Segwit2x supporters.

“I think I can now focus more on fruitful technical pursuits rather than fighting trolls,” Segwit2x developer Jean-Pierre Rupp responded.

Heated debates have taken place on social media platforms such as Reddit and Twitter, with the most serious ones involving death threats.

It was due to this environment that participants realized that the Segwit2x proposal might not be popular with the community and did not meet their initial expectations.

“The goal of the New York Consensus is to bring the community together and get the majority of users onto the same chain,” Peter Smith, CEO of cryptocurrency software provider Blockchain, wrote in a blog post.

Others share the view that a hard fork to increase the block size makes sense, but only if the protocol has support from all corners of the ecosystem.

“We are strong supporters of larger block sizes because our customers are impacted by transaction fees, but we want to see a responsible solution that brings the community together,” said Ron Hose, founder and CEO of Coins.ph.

The Future of Bitcoin

Still, there is a strong feeling among community members that Bitcoin will need to scale in the future to accommodate new users.

“We either bring big blocks to bitcoiners, or we let people choose bitcoin cash (BCH) with big blocks,” developer Peter Rizun told reporters.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, news of the 2X proposal’s failure was met with high praise from Lightning Network supporters.

“Now that 2x is officially dead, glad (the community) is back to working on long term solutions like Lightning,” Lightning Company CEO Elizabeth Stark tweeted.

However, while today’s news may provide a boost to Lightning Network implementation, the proposal also presents significant challenges.

The technical challenges of the Lightning Network were also discussed at a conference on bitcoin scaling held at Stanford University this week.

As Aviv Zohar of the Hebrew University pointed out, the Lightning Network will eventually need to be optimized for larger blocks.

Additionally, some believe that businesses will choose alternative protocols such as Bitcoin Cash or Litecoin.

“We may see more and more businesses moving to the Bitcoin Cash chain to conduct on-chain transactions because Bitcoin transaction fees are too high, and this is what Segwi2x is trying to do,” Vinny Lingham, founder and CEO of Civic, told reporters.

Jake Smith, business developer at Bitcoin.com and a staunch on-chain scaling supporter, said he sold all his Bitcoin immediately after hearing the news of the 2X proposal’s failure. His comments, while brief, showed how those who support the vision of Bitcoin as peer-to-peer cash viewed the news.

“As far as I’m concerned, Bitcoin just signed its own death warrant,” Smith added.

Likewise, OpenBazaar lead developer Chris Pacia said more companies may turn to other options.

“After the Bitcoin Cash fork, Segwit2x is effectively moot,” he said.

Segwit2xs in the future?

Although the Segwit2x expansion debate has come to a temporary end, the community has already had new thoughts on the future of Bitcoin.

The whole point of Bitcoin is that it is a decentralized, digital way to move value that no entity can control. For some, the failure of Segwit2x does not mean the end of larger block sizes.

Bitcoin developer Bashco noted:

“They will lick their wounds and regroup.”

“We have to study forks and chain splits because it is almost certain that these attempts will occur again,” Bitcoin Core developer Eric Lombrozo told reporters.

Matt Corallo, who has publicly feuded with members of the Segwit2x development team, expressed similar sentiments.

“Let’s take the failure of Segwit2x as a learning experience. The Bitcoin community is strong and any consensus rule change needs to have broad support from the community,” he said.

Anonymous Bitcoin blogger WhalePanda tweeted:

“We won the battle… but they’re going to keep coming back to destroy Bitcoin and we won’t forget that.”