Bitcoin price crash may be linked to mysterious closed-door meeting between miners and Bitcoin Core developers

A closed-door meeting of Bitcoin miners and Bitcoin Core developers brought market uncertainty, with the price of Bitcoin falling to around 608美元(as of press time).

(Image source: Coindesk)

Few details were released about the meeting, which was seen as the most important official encounter in bitcoin’s eight-year history, as no media or outsiders were invited to attend.

At present, we only know that there are 7 Chinese miners and mining company representatives participating in the meeting, as well as 20 Bitcoin Core and Lightning Network developers. Bitcoin Unlimited and Bitcoin Classic team members were not invited. Regarding this meeting, Bitcoin Jesus Roger Ver publicly stated:

I want to make one thing clear. Neither I nor Blockchain.info CEO Peter Smith were invited. So I think almost all commercial companies will not be invited. Only miners and Core developers should be able to participate in this meeting.

The organizers claimed that this meeting was just a simple "social event". But its real purpose seemed to be on-chain expansion, especially the release of the 2MB hard fork code before August 1 (now the deadline has passed, but Core has not released the code, which may have caused dissatisfaction in the community, brought uncertainty to the development of Bitcoin, and then caused the price of Bitcoin to fall).

There are basically no posts about this meeting on r/bitcoin (because it is censored by Core). However, the discussion on r/btc is very intense. Almost the entire community is focused on this historic Bitcoin meeting.

The drop in Bitcoin price could be related to market activity, or simply concerns within the community about the uncertainty of this meeting, or simply insider trading.

Core officials have not yet made any official announcement regarding this meeting. However, it seems that miners will decide whether to expand the chain later today. Whether the announcement is official or not, we are looking forward to it.

Posts in r/btc seem to think that today can put an end to the one and a half year long expansion dispute. The community is faced with two choices. One is to follow Ethereum and announce an unlimited expansion plan.

Compared to the Bitcoin community, the Ethereum community has a very different culture and philosophy. In the early days of development, they only viewed Ethereum as a technology, not a concept that was bound by strict rules or principles.

Hard forks are common in the Ethereum ecosystem. They can put the project in a highly unstable state in the short term as the community takes time to choose which chain to support, but in theory both chains can continue to operate peacefully.

The Bitcoin PoW hard fork will likely be led by several fairly experienced developers. If the three development teams, including Bitcoin Classic, XT and Unlimited, come together, there will be about 10 developers involved, but it all depends on the market's choice.

No matter what the final result is, it is better than leaving it unresolved. The expansion dispute has lasted for nearly a year and a half, consuming a lot of time and resources and hindering the development of Bitcoin. It is time for us to make up our minds to stop the infighting in the community and instead attract more participants, enterprises and venture capital companies to participate in the future of Bitcoin.