Segwit2x Beta Released and New UAHF Code Proposal `ABC´ Removes 1MB-Limit

Saturday, July 1st was filled with fresh new code as the Segwit2x working group released the team’s protocol beta v1.14.3 with release notes. Alongside this, a new implementation of a user-activated hard fork (UAHF) was made available for download the same day.

Also read: Mining, Merchants, and Traders—Thailand’s Got the Bitcoin Fever

The Segwit2x Beta Codebase Has Been Released

There’s a lot going on behind the scenes in the world of bitcoin development and even more so within the context of scaling. This weekend the Segwit2x beta was released, as well as a bitcoin developer’s mailing list message from Jeff Garzik who’s been doing a lot of the code work for this project. The new release includes various bug fixes and consensus changes according to the Github repo.

“The charter and goal of the segwit2x effort has always been tightly focused on a “SegWit + 2M HF” safe network upgrade, and producing/testing/auditing software to accomplish that,” explains the Segwit2x beta release. “Milestones are intentionally labeled “alpha” or “beta” per normal software engineering practices, and expectations should be set accordingly.”

The over-simplified summary of the network upgrade sequence is: bit-4 SegWit activation + 144*90 blocks This matches the goal outlined in the kickoff Project Mission: “Segwit will start being enforced shortly after lock in, whereas as 2mb blocks will be a bit farther out to ensure people have plenty of time to upgrade their nodes.”

Bitcoin proponents, who are often very vocal on social media and forums, are still voicing mixed signals when it comes to this compromise. As far as mining support goes, the “intention” to signal the next steps is roughly 84.7 percent at the time of writing.

The User Activated Hard Fork Code “Bitcoin ABC” Revealed

At The Future of Bitcoin event in Arnhem, software engineer and the chief developer of the D compiler SDC, Amaury Séchet, revealed “Bitcoin ABC”, an implementation of a UAHF.

Séchet gave the crowd in Arnhem an explanation of the ABC protocol by detailing that it falls in line with Bitmain’s recent contingency plan announcement. However, Bitmain has not officially made any statements concerning endorsement of the Bitcoin ABC project. During the conference, the developer answered questions about the new implementation and revealed it doesn’t support Segwit or Replace By Fee (RBF) components. The fork will also remove the 1MB block size limit and will follow this UAHF spec available for review on Github.      

“This UAHF specification is inspired by the idea of a flag day, but changed to a time-based fork due to miner requests,” explains the UAHF spec. “It should be possible to change easily to a height-based fork – the sense of the requirements would largely stay the same.”

Furthermore, the team has revealed its vision of “achievable block sizes over the coming years” which scales upwards of 16MB by August of 2019. Séchet further announced at the conference the project is being helped by a pseudonym programmer named “Ftrader.” The developers have also started a Bitcoin ABC subreddit where Ftrader has been responding to questions and a very basic website as well. The team’s site has the Bitcoin ABC binaries and code available for download.

With the beta code release for Segwit2x, the new UAHF code, and the current user-activated soft fork (UASF) movement there’s a lot to follow this summer in regards to the bitcoin scaling debate and solutions from many development teams. Bitcoin.com will be sure to keep our readers informed every step of the way.

What do you think about the beta release of Segwit2x? What do you think about the UAHF plan? Let us know in the comments below.

Images via Shutterstock, The Future of Bitcoin, and the Bitcoin ABC and Segwit2x Github repos.

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