SegWit2x Hard Fork Finally Occurs After a Lot of Confusion

Things finally went as per schedule at 6PM UTC on Dec. 28 2017, as the much awaited SegWit2x hard fork finally went through at block number 501451, as a group of developers claims to have forked the Bitcoin blockchain finally.

The SegWit2x hard fork which has been designed to solve the scalability issues of Bitcoin has created a lot of confusion in the past. Initially scheduled on Nov. 16 last month the hard fork was canceled a week earlier due to some difference in opinion between the members of the development community.

Thus in order to differentiate from the November hard fork headed by Jeff Garzik, this implementation is called as "SegWit2X X11” after its hashing algorithm. X11 here represent the encryption coins and will be linked to a different type of mining rig such that the SegWit2x blockchain won’t withdraw any hash power from Bitcoin.

However, the announcement of the hard fork has created a lot of confusion as previously many exchanges who pledged to offer support to the fork are likely to only trade futures for it. Of course, the new coins generated from the hard fork on Dec. 28, will exist as a completely different digital asset.

All the euphoria surrounding the SegWit2x which has existed earlier amongst users has now died and now users are absolutely unsure and perplexed that which wallets or exchanges will support the digital asset. Moreover, the project also looks half-finished at this point in time and no details are available regarding when the mainnet will release.

The actual movement for SegWit2x started back in May 2017 as an outcome of the New York Agreement (NYA). The agreement was signed between 50 different and leading Bitcoin companies. However, a split was soon visible as a compromise regarding scaling of Bitcoin was to be made.

“Small Blockers” proposed for developing additional second-layer solution called SegWit which took place on Aug. 24 2017. This was the first part of the compromise. The other part was to appease “Big Blockers” by increasing the block size to 2MB, which was never followed and straight away led to the violation of the agreement.

When the actual fork was to happen on Nov. 16, before that, developers revealed the actual code for the hard fork which did not go quite well with the Bitcoin community and was not accepted that ultimately led to the cancellation.

Although there have been multiple forks in the Bitcoin blockchain, only two forks and its Bitcoins offshoots - Bitcoin Cash and Bitcoin Gold - are successfully trading on the crypto charts and have been accepted by a larger section of the Bitcoin community.

Well, the X11 digital asset out of SegWit2x will have to prove that it can be mined properly to establish itself with the exchanges.