With April coming to a close and the halving in three months, bitcoin’s scalability is reaching decision time. Following a year of heated debate, wide consensus has been achieved on a maxblocksize increase, segwit deployment and support for the Lightning Network. The only outstanding issue is one of timing. Can segwit be ready before the halving? If not, should maxblocksize be increased so as to provide brief respite?
Following suggestions that segwit has been delayed as a CSV softfork is currently in process, it seems that a meeting took place in Beijing on the 30 th of March. According to a tweet by Eric Mu, CMO of HaoBTC, representatives from Coinbase, 21inc, Blockchain.info, Okcoin, Antpool, F2pool, BTCC, KNC and Gavin Andresen, Chief Scientist at the Bitcoin Foundation, attended.
The exact details of the discussion are not publicly known. However, bitcoin’s scalability was likely at center stage. They would have probably discussed bitcoin’s current transaction capacity, which is running at maximum, and potential methods to safely upgrade the network. Presumably, prior to the halving.
Although some are alleging money was involved, it is highly unlikely anything nefarious would have occurred in what appears to be a meeting between many very prominent bitcoiners, bitcoin businesses and the majority of miners.
It appears that Samson Mow was not invited. A relative newcomer who joined BTCC in 2015, many perceive Mow’s recent actions as highly unprofessional and very divisive, which may have been a contributing factor. However, representatives of BTCC did attend. Is Segwit Delayed?
On the 20 th of February 2016, Adam Back, President of Blockstream, Matt Corallo, Luke Jr, Cory Fields, Peter Todd, Johnson Lau and the majority of miners agreed in an 18 hour long allegedly secret meeting to “run a SegWit release in production by the time such a hard-fork is released […]
