SegWit2x Hard Fork to Go Ahead on Dec. 28, Says Official Website

27. Dec 2017 Posted by Akolkar B on News

The SegWit2X hard fork has remained for long a topic of big debate. The hard fork which was earlier scheduled in the second week of November was canceled owing to some internal differences between the members of the community.

Now, as per the latest updates available on its official website, SegWit2x hard fork will move ahead tomorrow i.e. Dec 28. and will occur at block 501451. The confirmation of the hard fork to go through is given on the company’s website as well in a direct quote from the project’s Founder and Lead Developer, Jaap Terlouw. The quote states “Our team will carry out the Bitcoin hard fork, which was planned for mid-November.”

One of the major purposes proposed behind the hard fork is to solve the issues pertaining to reduction in transaction speeds and increase in the transactions costs on the Bitcoin network. Also, the project’s roadmap includes other features like:

  • Offline codes
  • Support for Lightning Network, instant transactions
  • ZkSnark
  • Ethereum smart contracts
  • Anonymous Transactions

Terlouw on his website has stated that the hard fork aims to overcome issues of “commission and transaction speed within the Bitcoin network,” and further added that at the moment, Bitcoin is “almost impossible to use as a means of payment.”

As an additional incentive to the development team for their dedicated work on the project, the founder has also said that in addition to getting BTC equivalent B2X coins generated from the fork, they will also get “a proportional number of Satoshi Nakamoto’s Bitcoins as a reward for their commitment to progress.” A total of eight exchanges are said to have listed as an official support for the fork.

HitBTC is one such popular exchange whose name has been mentioned on the SegWit2x official website. Quoting HitBTC, Terlouw said “At the same time, trading of its [SegWit2x] futures has been carried out on some exchanges for a long time. HitBTC is among them.”

Bitcoin’s scalability issues have recently shifted the investors focus to the Bitcoin derivate - Bitcoin Cash which surged recently after Coinbase announced support for the altcoin. Bitcoin Cash was created with the same argument that the existing Bitcoin network has a small block size and not enough to process multiple transactions in short time.

A similar issue is in focus along with many other with the upcoming SegWit2X hard fork. In addition to implementing Segregated Witness, the development team will also implement:

  • Block size increased up to 4 mb
  • The high production rate of the block is 2.5 minutes
  • Unique address format
  • Recalculation of complexity after each block
  • Protection against repeated transactions
  • Using the X11 encryption algorithm

Now as things look to be almost final this time, it will be interesting to see how Bitcoin reacts to the upcoming event.