BU or Core? Why doesn’t F2Pool choose a team?

Many expected Wang Chun to start signaling support for activating the Segregated Witness (SegWit) soft fork, especially after the recent showdown with Bitcoin Core and Bitcoin Unlimited.

As the founder of F2Pool, which accounts for about 12% of the network's computing power, Wang Chun insisted on his own ideas and did not give in. In addition, Wang Chun did not show obvious support for BU, so we can say that Wang Chun and F2Pool are currently in a neutral position.

His stance on the hard fork issue has always been considered the most rational among many important participants in the cryptocurrency circle, especially when he stated that Bitcoin cannot and will not fork.

A deeper look

Although he has received some praise for not supporting BU, a closer look at his comments on Bitcoin scalability issues shows that he has not completely ruled out the possibility of a Bitcoin fork. Instead, we can infer from his comments that the conditions for a fork are not yet in place.

On March 25, when the value of Bitcoin fell below $900, about 46.5% of the miners of the last 144 blocks supporting BU had different opinions. Wang Chun once posted a post on Twitter that seemed to be intended to protect miners and transfer the hot potato to developers.

He elaborated that miners "are using their hashing power to save Bitcoin from malicious developers." These developers refuse to admit that blocks are full and claim that 300KB is enough for now. Wang Chun then mentioned that an unavailable network is useless no matter how secure it is.

He also advocated singling out a Core developer as one of the "few developers still contributing to Bitcoin code." According to a QQ screenshot posted on the 8btc forum, F2Pool co-founder Mao Shixing called Core developers "scumbags" and BU's code "terrible," which proves F2Pool's attitude towards both camps - supporting Segregated Witness and supporting large blocks.

Why doesn’t Yuchi choose to side with one side?

Over the past few months, F2Pool has been seen as the key to activating SegWit in Litecoin. Wang Chun pointed out that the decision to support “those who often regard you as an enemy” needs to be rethought.

Bitcoin hard forks have been seen as risks that require careful planning, sufficient time to deploy, and are especially dangerous for large assets. It is clear that F2Pool is working on reducing mining costs in the foreseeable future, but the debate over forks will continue.

This would be of practical significance as the recently proposed concept of a “user activated soft fork” (UASF) has also sparked a lot of controversy. According to reports, the UASF proposal calls for upgrading the Bitcoin network without the support of miners.