56 Bitcoin Companies Approve Segwit-2Mb Combined Fork Plan

Barry Silbert’s firm the Digital Currency Group (DCG) revealed a scaling agreement on May 23 with a letter of intent backed by 56 Bitcoin companies, for Sergio De Lerner’s recent Segwit-2Mb plan. The announcement states the signed agreement represents a “critical mass of the bitcoin ecosystem” with 83.28% of hash power supporting the proposal.

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The Anticipated ‘Barry Silbert Scaling Proposal’ Has Been Revealed

For a few days bitcoin enthusiasts have been anticipating the “Barry Silbert” scaling plan  hinted at a few days ago. Following Silbert’s statements about a new scaling effort, a meeting took place in connetion to the Consensus 2017 conference. As the conference came to an end, Silbert’s venture capital firm DCG revealed the compromise proposal.

The agreement is supported by 56 digital currency companies stemming from 21 countries worldwide. The letter states the agreement has the backing of over 83 percent of the network’s hash power. This group represents 5.1 billion USD monthly on chain transaction volume and 20.5 million bitcoin wallets within the economy.

“We agree to immediately support the following parallel upgrades to the bitcoin protocol, which will be deployed simultaneously and based on the original Segwit-2Mb proposal,” explains the DCG announcement.  

Activate Segregated Witness at an 80% threshold, signaling at bit 4 and activate a 2 MB hard fork within six months.

A Proposal to Lower the Segwit Threshold to 80%

Prior to DCG’s announcement discussions of lowering the Segwit threshold that took place during the Consensus 2017 scaling panel, Eric Lombrozo stated it was possible to lower the Segwit threshold. After the discussion on May 22, Bitcoin developer James Hilliard proposed a “Reduced signaling threshold activation” BIP.

“I would like to propose an implementation that accomplishes the first part of the Barry Silbert proposal independently from the second: ‘Activate Segregated Witness at an 80% threshold, signaling at bit 4,’” explains Hilliard. “The goal here is to minimize chain split risk and network disruption while maximizing backward compatibility and still providing for rapid activation of Segwit at the 80% threshold using bit 4.”

By activating segwit immediately and separately from any HF we can scale quickly without risking a rushed combined segwit+HF that would almost certainly cause widespread issues.

Companies/Individuals that Approved Consensus; The Future of Bitcoin

Some of the notable companies and people that agreed to this Segwit activation compromise include Decentral, Grayscale investments, Jaxx, Bitmain, Xapo, Yours, Bitmain, Bitpay, Gavin Andresen, Bitcoin.com and Guy Corem.

The medium article further suggested the community is prepared to handle any growing pains as a cohesive whole that has proven technical compromises can be made in the most challenging and high-risk environments. The consensus article echoed this sentiment:

“We are also committed to the research and development of technical mechanisms to improve signaling in the bitcoin community, as well as to put in place communication tools, in order to more closely coordinate with ecosystem participants in the design, integration, and deployment of safe solutions that increase bitcoin capacity.”

Do you think this concludes the mining debate? Will Bitcoin be able to scale successfully? Let us know in the comments section below.

With additional reporting provided by Jamie Redman. 

Images courtesy of Shutterstock and segwit.co

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