Bitcoin Hard Fork Controversy Status: 27 Companies Support Bitcoin Unlimited, 44 Oppose

Although Bitcoin Unlimited (BU) has been welcomed by many miners, in fact only a small number of Bitcoin companies still support BU, which can provide larger blocks and propose emergent consensus.

Although Bitcoin Unlimited is popular among miners, not many companies support it. Image source: Golden Finance

Splits between companies

The competition between the two main Bitcoin enhancement proposals, Segregated Witness (SegWit) and Bitcoin Unlimited (BU), is heating up.
As the dispute heats up, supporters of both sides are threatened to encourage users to activate a fork (either a hard fork or a soft fork). From the perspective of hash power, BU is the most popular option; from the perspective of the company, the conclusion is just the opposite.

Current status of Bitcoin hard fork controversy: 27 companies support Bitcoin Unlimited, 44 oppose Image source: Bitcoin Information Network, Golden Finance

At the time of writing, CoinDance lists 66 blockchains that support SegWit, 58 that are ready to activate, and only eight that are against it.
As for Bitcoin Unlimited, 27 companies support Bitcoin Unlimited and 9 are ready for a hard fork. In other words, 70% of the companies support Segregated Witness, while only 20% support BU, and the other 10% are either undecided or "don't know". The list of companies supporting Bitcoin Unlimited is as follows:

List of 35 companies that support Bitcoin Unlimited Image source: Golden Finance

It is worth noting that among the nine companies ready to execute the Bitcoin hard fork plan, two also support Segregated Witness (Electrum and Trezor), and five are ready to activate Segregated Witness.
It is also important to note that some companies do not support Bitcoin Unlimited, but this does not mean that they support Segregated Witness. They just do not support BU's emergent consensus.
Meanwhile, four of the eight companies opposing SegWit in favor of Bitcoin Unlimited are Bitcoin mining pools.

Who is supporting what?

We can find that major exchanges such as Poloniex, LocalBitcoins, and CoinCheck are ready to activate Segregated Witness, but small exchanges such as BTCC, Xapo, and Bitso have only expressed their support.

On the other hand, in addition to Bitcoin.com, Magnr, BitAddress.org and several BTM (Bitcoin ATM) providers, industry giants such as Bitmain's Antpool, ViaBTC and GBMiners have expressed support for Bitcoin Unlimited. Recently, the independence of these mining pools has been questioned by the community.

China's Bitcoin mining pool ViaBTC plans to build an overseas Bitcoin exchange in the second half of this year. Image source: Golden Finance

(Chinese mining pool @ViaBTC plans to build an overseas #Bitcoin exchange in the second half of 2017, and has received $20 million in Series A funding, led by Bitmain. — cnLedger (@cnLedger) 2017/4/5)

At the same time, major exchanges including OKCoin, Bitfinex and Gemini support both solutions.

The companies that publicly expressed opposition to SegWit are four mining pools and four small companies with little influence in the Bitcoin ecosystem. In contrast, the companies that expressed opposition to Bitcoin Unlimited are well-known companies, such as BitGo, Vaultoro, Bitsquare and GreenAddress.

Companies that have not yet decided include Bitstamp, Bittrex, Bitmex and Kraken.

Most Bitcoiners Oppose BU Hard Fork

We can also see the overall trend from some of the industry statements signed so far: opposition to unlimited hard forks of Bitcoin.

For example, nearly 20 exchanges on the list have signed a contingency plan for a hard fork: BU tokens are listed under the name BTU or XBU.
The Canadian Bitcoin ecosystem also issued an industry statement in which a large number of economic node operators expressed opposition to Bitcoin Unlimited and proposed the establishment of industry guidelines for hard forks.

Not only that, the data also shows (different source data, different statistics) that Bitcoin Core nodes account for 84% to 91% of the total network nodes, while Bitcoin Unlimited only accounts for 2% to 9%.

Bitcoin Core nodes account for more than 80% of the total network nodes. Image source: Bitcoin Information Network, Golden Finance

From the data, we can draw the following conclusion: Although Bitcoin is increasingly favored by mining pools, the vast majority of Bitcoin companies and node operators are opposed to this hard fork plan.