A compendium of information on why (Segwit)2x failed. https://twitter.com/Ragnarly/status/916072098245701632 Introduction I’ve decided a follow-up to my would be fitting now that the 2X hard-fork initiative is behind us. I didn’t intend for it to be a “Part 1” of something bigger so these two posts aren’t structured as such. Please go read that first. I to also address the precedents that have been set by the two major forks of 2017 and what this probably means for the future direction of the Bitcoin protocol we all love so much, but like the original post this became way too long I intend on following up with another article on those subjects at some point, this post will cover 2X. My posts attempt to serve as a bridge between an entry-level and mid-level understanding of Bitcoin and the political thicket that drives it, so I’m going to try and keep this in that range. If you but you own Bitcoin, or kind of know how Bitcoin works, this article is for you. original post wanted (and Airdrops) (mostly due to screenshots). “don’t understand what’s going on with all of these forks” What is 2X? Where did it come from? Why did it fail? I want to preface this by stating that I don’t hate Barry Silbert for creating 2X. I think it’s possible he may have genuinely tried to help and simply couldn’t anticipate the chaos that happened in response. That being said, he used his only strike here, so let it be a learning experience for him and an example for anyone in the future who thinks they can do the same. Richard Heart put it into good context , and also goes on to talk about the failure of Bitcoin Cash, but that alt-coin isn’t worth my time in this article. I’ll let you decide who Wile E. Coyote is. https://twitter.com/nvk/status/922812211831042049 I’d like to consider my time writing everything below well spent, not wasted, but Rodolfo’s point still stands: Let’s get up to speed. 2X was DOA. First, it doesn’t deserve to be called SegWit2x. I’ll be calling it what it is: . 2X Second, any future hijacking of any future upgrade proposal with an attached +2X at the end is just another rehashing of the same attack. The attack is made to look amorphous, and it’s backed by people who don’t know they are pawns. 2X is 2X no matter what it’s attached to, no matter who’s leading it, no matter who’s coding it. Here’s why 2X failed (or beginning, middle, or nulled out of the name entirely) (and sometimes lead) this time. Index 2X Roots: The New York Agreement 2X Reception: The Community’s Response 2X Reneging: The Fallout 2X Retraction: The Cancellation The New York Agreement Let’s begin with 2X’s origin in order to understand why it fell off. This isn’t a history of the scaling debate, just know that ‘big-blocks’ have been touted by a small group for some time as a solution to the ‘scaling problem’. All of their attempts have failed and for good reason, 2X was no exception. While the majority of the community was endorsing the pending activation of , miners were blocking it, so a 3rd party came in and packaged SegWit with ‘big-blocks’, calling it a ‘compromise’. an advantage in the mining process awarded to those who controlled significant hashpower, This meant millions of dollars lost for Bitmain if SegWit was activated in it’s current soft-fork form, so Bitmain was blocking the upgrade. They publicly control two of the major mining pools, and some speculate the top four . Miners can leave, but they’re motivated by profit and Bitmain provides a steady source of income. The users were getting fed up with SegWit being blocked so some of them decided they were going to activate SegWit without the centralized miners ‘approval’ via a . A small group and some businesses began very vocally demanding an increase in block size There were many discussions on the topic prior to this point, here’s an hour long from 2015. Here’s the from Consensus 2017, and here’s a segment from that panel: SegWit Bitmain had been exploiting (ASICBoost) which SegWit indirectly prevented. (backwards compatible) (over 50%) UASF despite SegWit being a block increase. panel panel “We don’t sell cups of coffee”…“Our bread and butter is $5, 10, 20k price range for a typical transaction.” That was Stephen Pair at Consensus 2017 on , talking about how Bitcoin doesn’t work for his company , and that they have no choice but to use a fork of Bitcoin. What didn’t happen at Consensus was nobody told Stephen that his business model is faulty, his company’s software was inefficient, oh…and that What exactly is it about the block size that hinders your company’s ability to process $20,000 transactions? He 4 days before the panel, in an effort to dismiss how he might be bought by Bitmain. Here’s Stephen one year that clip, praising the developers for not giving in to the block size push: (CEO of BitPay) May 22nd anymore Bitcoin never “worked” for his company. put this out before https://twitter.com/spair/status/757908557949984769 On , the stepped in and announced what became known as “ ”. The of the agreement was that all of the companies listed came together and decided to move forward with a ‘combined’ scaling solution: a increase in block size. Truth is, a handful of other business leaders were just and told to sign if they want to avoid a fork. Few actually 2X, they just didn’t want a fork, and none actually represented the voices or their customers. We also haven’t seen any companies that signed speak out and say they actually took part in the process of writing this agreement, it was all done behind closed doors by Barry and __??__. May 23rd Digital Currency Group (CEO is Barry Silbert , who’s not affiliated with any of the the development process up until that point) The New York Agreement implication SegWit + 2X presented with the agreement already put together by the DCG (see Reddit screenshots below) wanted , and offering their own solutions like Bitcoin which had an block size. This leveraging, coupled with the miners already blocking SegWit for monetary reasons gave the of a heavily divided community. ultimately failed like it’s predecessors ‘ and pushed by the same group and they ended up divided between 2X and later Bitcoin successfully forked but knew it was designed to fail and a scam, so the 2X proponents kept pushing 2X. Were there some people stuck in between? Yes, but they were far and few. Some groups have been leveraging the big-block push for some time leading up to this by downplaying and ridiculing the SegWit upgrade ‘Unlimited’ unlimited appearance ‘Unlimited’ Classic’ ‘XT’, ‘Cash’. ‘Cash’ most (really just some CEOs and ‘Cash’ supporters who wanted to divide us) https://twitter.com/SatoshiLite/status/925764562929848320 The Community’s Response Initial reception of the NYA from the community wasn’t positive. Opposition was across the board and built from the ground up over time until it became an undeniable failure that ended with the whole thing being called off. You can check out that and read all the comments if you wish, and I recommend it, Like all big announcements, it was subsequently and full of opposition as well. Go read it all yourself, here’s some highlights: NYA link please go read other peoples opinions. submitted to Reddit (ok it’s a lot) https://0bin.net/paste/T0xP9qKeBmLiOybE#bw8g7mxCLgO1d2Yp29nayYij3lUxv7AgYjBuxz1ynPB If it wasn’t clear from the beginning that 2X was a widely contested proposal, what else happened that led to it’s inevitable demise? For starters, . There was no client you could download and run that would support this proposal. That changed when Jeff Garzik stepped in and spawned ‘btc1’. You can check out btc1 , but you won’t find much activity because almost all of the work and decision making process was done in private, which is the exact opposite of consensus. All the ‘work’ that Jeff Garzik put into copying Bitcoin can be found there. I’ll admit that statement is considered a bit biased for a marginal part of the community, but it a copy. It’s goal was to become Bitcoin and it didn’t successfully achieve what it set out to do, but how did this come to be? I’d like to keep it simple and just say the community decided on a coin and that was it but it really wasn’t. So why did the community decide this way? Was it UASF/Dragon hats and Twitter tags? there was no code here is The https://twitter.com/Excellion/status/872646717266509824 Okay, so it’s a little bit more complicated than that, but the fact of the matter is people like to ‘wear their heart on their sleeve’, … some Emin …They want to let everybody know who they support and that they think their view is ‘the right one’. , but this isn’t a unique act specific to certain types of groups, this is a desire across the political spectrum. As such, when the ‘sleeve-hearting’ is visibly in favor of one view you can reasonably assume it has influence on the economic support, if it’s not directly part of it. They could be wrong across all outlets (It was, proof below.) the majority of the community, , were against 2X, and I’ll provide many of the signs prior to the fork that made me confident of that fact, starting with the Twitter hashtags. A percentage of the entire Bitcoin community actively uses Twitter to communicate, An even smaller percentage of us used NO2X tags, so I started making a list for both NO2X and Pro-2X supporters . Twitter only let’s you search for up to 108 people at a single time, and it will show you the ones with the most common connections based off of some algorithm they use, so you won’t find accurate totals just by searching if they exceed 108. The rest of these list members came from seeing them in the wild and redoing the search every now and then. Keep in mind, if I saw comments that were Pro2X but then the persons history shows them supporting Bitcoin , they weren’t included: The reality is, including the companies small most just lurk. (just those who have used the tag) ‘Cash’ https://twitter.com/StopAndDecrypt/lists/no2x You could also just look at the differences between their Slack communities. Here’s a comparison between both of their largest channels: 7,705 vs. 413 If it’s any consolation, although this one can easily be argued because I don’t have any tangible data: #bitcoin is the 3rd largest IRC channel on Freenode at the moment and is moderated by and frequented primarily by Core supporters. There is no 2X IRC channel. There’s an #Ethereum channel, there’s a #Monero channel, there’s a #Litecoin channel, there’s a #ZCash channel, there’s a #Dash channel…#Dogecoin, #Gridcoin, #Filecoin, #IOTA, #Namecoin, #Vertcoin, #Siacoin, #Rubycoin, [X]coin, [Y]coin, [Z]coin, #BitcoinXT, #BitcoinChat (bitcoin.com, ‘Cash’, r/btc) , but no 2X: everyone saw through the antics many of the fake 2X proponents were using, like being “anti-NO2X”, In fact most 2X support on social media were by proponents. I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again: Not everyone has the same end goal, and it’s all loosely/poorly organized, but it’s . Some want another coin to take it’s place, while others are just sitting on piles of Bitcoin and would love the opportunity to dump the newly forked coins. The screenshot below shows a promoted by a Bitcoin ‘ supporter, talking down about NO2X and promoting the 2X split, lying in the process. Then Tuur Demeester’s reply to “every major exchange”, along with a reply from BitMEX: The reality is, but then going and supporting Bitcoin ‘ Cash’ . (barring the CEOs advocating it) ‘Cash’ There is a systemic attempt to divide the Bitcoin community. real (like Ethereum) (paid for advertisement) Cash’ Roger Ver’s exploitation of 2X to divide the community in effort prop up Bitcoin ‘Cash’. Endorsed by the main developer of 2X, knowing Roger’s scam: This is Roger’s presentation where he was literally on stage promoting Bitcoin one week prior. Why would he support 2X on his site?: ‘Cash’ Why is Roger Ver actively supporting the 2X agenda if he already has Bitcoin ? Well, this is something everyone else asked themselves too, and… ‘Cash’ no matter how much you lie and spread misinformation, the community at large has yet to be blindsided by it. It’s unfortunate for those who are lured in , but there are simply too many of us paying attention and calling you out for it. written specifically in response to Erik Vorhees’ behavior, is a perfect example of this. If you haven’t read that article yet, please go bookmark it for later. In the meantime, here’s just one example from Erik: …The reality is, (my posts aims to help prevent that) This article (by The Pirate Who Can’t Be Named ) — https://bitcoincore.org/en/2015/12/23/capacity-increases-faq/ https://twitter.com/ErikVoorhees/status/913049220025688064 the software that’s been running for 9 years now is continually changing but has been consistently supported by majority of the leading developers and community. Almost none of the developers were in support of 2X either, and the community was able to recognize the importance of this. For a long list of developer responses please go see my prior post, or refer to this , or this . I just don’t think these charts could be any more clear: The reality is, Reddit thread Twitter thread https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Segwit_support all of this was reflected in the futures markets. Futures markets in this context are pretty simple: If you have 1 Bitcoin you can lock it up on an exchange a chain split and receive the two 2 coins you would normally get after the . The only catch is, they don’t actually exist until the split occurs, which is why the exchange locks up your Bitcoin first. You’re trading fake tokens with a semi-legally binding contract. Bitfinex was the first exchange to set a market up and the phase took less than a day, followed by a steady decline. At the time of the screenshot below, the price for a 2X token on Bitfinex was $1,060, while Bitcoin was cruising at $7,315 and BT1 tokens were $6,483. 2X tokens were priced at 0.14 the price of a Bitcoin and dropping. The results were of course dismissed as “manipulated”, “not an accurate representation of the community”, etc… The 2nd futures market set up was by the exchange OKEx. They even made a Twitter poll that ended up directly correlated with their futures market prices at the time. You tell me what the market was thinking: The reality is, before (BT1/BT2) split price discovery (BT2) Same results. (off by 1%) Says something about the accuracy of Twitter polls , doesn’t it? We’ll get back to that in a moment… (at least in the Bitcoin community) multiple anti- polls were done to determine community support and they were all dismissed by 2X supporters as being manipulated or simply just not an accurate representation of the community.The following is ’s poll that requires you to log into Coinbase before you can vote. Since Coinbase is heavily regulated with KYC laws, you can only have 1 account per person, and in turn only vote once. These results speak for themselves: The reality is, Sybil (anti-voting multiple times) despite the futures market making it clear, Luke Dashjr (know your customer) https://luke.dashjr.org/programs/kycpoll/answers.php The following was a non-traditional Twitter poll that required people to on the tweet with a Yes or No: comment Everyone who commented can have their Twitter feed analyzed. Everyone who objects to Twitter polls being gamed can ‘No’ and grouping them into ‘probably fake’ / ‘not sure’ / ‘probably real’. You can easily take the No’s in the ‘probably real’ group and still compare that to Keep in mind how generous that suggestion is and how it completely ignores the fact that there are In hindsight it’s reasonable to assume that there were, given what we’ve seen in the past: go and look through every single profile that voted only all of the Yes votes. likely an equal amount of, if not more, fake/paid for twitter accounts for the 2X movement. The Fallout Let’s take a look at a hypothetical: You’re the CEO of a company in the Bitcoin space. You have customers to serve and liabilities for mistakes because there’s money on the line. You’re not the average Joe reading this article just now and learning what’s going on, you’ve been directly following all of it this whole time. What do you do? Also, did you already sign the NYA? How big is your ego? Do you really think you have as much pull as you think you do? (or they leave) Options: Stick to your guns despite overwhelming community rejection because “LOL it’s just kids in their basement with hats, I’m a CEO bitch.” Renege on the agreement you only really signed to a split. avoid Let the “community” or “market” decide. Go completely dark. (I’m looking at you Barry) If owned a company, I would poll my clients/customers and publish the results. If owned an exchange, I would offer both tokens. That being said, my philosophical opinion is that , which means the original chain keeps the name and the ticker for an indefinite period of time. We can debate the definition of “ all day, but that doesn’t have an effect on the initial decision to support both chains while granting the title to the incumbent by default. I I the incumbent maintains the title unless superseded or overthrown successfully successful” Let’s take a look at what actually happened: Companies started dropping out of the NYA. Not a single company joined after the initial proposal was announced. More companies started dropping out and denouncing 2X support. Groups/Organizations across the globe spoke out against 2X. Most exchanges announced they would let the incumbent keep the name & ticker, if not indefinitely at least until the results were clear. Some companies/exchanges outright rejected 2X and didn’t even award their customers 2X tokens. Some CEOs I mentioned above stuck to their guns or went dark until the very last minute, while others tried to swivel out of being directly responsible for the fork. Let’s take a look at what some of the CEOs were doing: Barry Silbert went into hiding 6 weeks prior to the planned fork, probably attempting to mitigate bad PR. It’s much harder to land back on your feet after backing 2X all the way up to the day of the forks cancellation. It’s better PR to stop talking 2 months ahead of time. (CEO of the DCG) Jeff Garzik revealed his ICO for . A ‘cross-blockchain’ solution meant to ease the worries of those scared of blockchain forks. Funded with VC money by the DCG of course. Almost as if the 2X forking FUD he created by coding a client nobody supported with zero replay protection would benefit his new startup. Was he ready to lead Bitcoin development while diverting half his attention to his new company? Without Jeff coding btc1, who would developing 2X into the future? Who’s running the software? (CEO of Bloq) Metronome (btc1/2X) Why were all the 2,000 btc1 nodes started up at the same time and running on Amazon? Stephen Pair broke social media silence in favor of Bitcoin Sticking to his guns on using a fork of Bitcoin but clearly unable to make up his mind on which fork he should be using . Given the fact that he’s not selecting a chain based on the technology but by which one is more usable for his company, one would think he doesn’t have Bitcoin’s best interest in mind. : (CEO of BitPay) ‘Cash’. (or knew the about the cancellation ahead of time) Does this break his NYA agreement regarding support for 2X? Mike Belshe outright lying about about Bitcoin nodes and SPV clients, as a last ditch attempt to stir support for 2X. I happened to be the . You can no longer see my comment under his post for some reason. That being said, enough people had the same sentiment, go read them all. He also helped on the title of this post, and took part in with Core developer Matt Corallo. You want “noise about corporate takeover” to go away Mike? Try realizing your actions directly contribute to that noise. is completely against your stance, and you’ve admitted this yourself: (CEO of BitGo) posted here on Medium (possibly just ignorance) first to reply inspire me this interview 2X has no real nodes, they (YOU) had to spin up 2,000 of them on Amazon, your own employee — https://twitter.com/lopp/status/925778410965647360 https://twitter.com/Beautyon_/status/926433562613747713 _From the beginning, Segwit2x was designed to keep the community together. The team never wanted to see a chain split …_medium.com Keeping the Community Together https://twitter.com/hrdng/status/920714828934778880 Erik Voorhees continued being Erik. I honestly just think he’s severely misguided and seeing it through the lens of a CEO who wants to grow his own business. My response to that is the same as Stephen Pair: , and you’re best realizing that sooner than later Erik. Bitcoin never owed room on the blockchain, and it doesn’t owe ShapeShift either. Learn to adapt and use the Lightning Network. Also, don’t say you’re going to stay out of the debate and then go post on Reddit about the debate. (CEO of ShapeShift) Bitcoin doesn’t care about your business SatoshiDice You’re behavior throughout this entire process has consistently made me rethink giving you any benefit of the doubt, and many have already given up on you entirely. That being said, your final statement is holding you on by a thread at the moment and the only thing that is keeping you afloat in my eyes is your promise to not advocate any future scaling debates ever again: https://twitter.com/ErikVoorhees/status/928646295249502208 Roger Ver announced his website will promote 2X even though he’s an advocate and direct contributor to the promotion of Bitcoin I called him out on it repeatedly and he blocked me. For someone who claims censorship all the time, you’d think he would allow my opinions on his tweets. Please watch he did with Richard Heart if you want to get a feel for Roger. He truly believes he’s right, but he’s an “ends justifies the means” kind of person, and will lie and deceive to get to what he thinks is right. (CEO of Bitcoin.com) ‘Cash’. this recent interview Jihan Wu remained a signer of the NYA despite actively mining / advocating / directly contributing to Bitcoin At one point 50% of the miners switched to Bitcoin ‘Cash’ because of it’s chaotic EDA algorithm. Would you agree that if miners are now mining an alternative chain that is neither The Incumbent or 2X, that they’ve backed out of the NYA? How can you sign an agreement saying “My pools hashpower, which is 25% of the total network, supports the NYA”, but then hashpower goes off and does something else? Slushpool lets the miners decide: (CEO of Bitmain) ‘Cash’. How can you sign for the individual miners that use your pool? Vinny Lingham was outspoken for 2X since its inception. I mentioned him in my prior article for openly admitting 2X was never about the blocksize, but about taking power away from the developers that created it all. Since then he’s admitted his opinions on scaling shouldn’t matter . I agree, he’s an entrepreneur, not a developer. He said he would back off, we gave him the benefit of the doubt, and then he continued to promote 2X. Now that it failed he’s been slowly talking more about Bitcoin Oh, and he’s an advisor to Jeff Garzik’s ICO… (CEO of Civic) after having this debate (please go watch that) ‘Cash’. Jiang Zhuoer just straight up broke his part of the NYA agreement. You can’t even contest this: (CEO of BTC.Top) https://www.coindesk.com/split-no-split-bitcoin-miners-see-no-certainty-segwit2x-fork/ Craig Wright (is a fraud): I’m going to close this section with a compilation of statements that were released by various companies and groups across the globe regarding 2X . My personal favorite was the response from BitMEX: (I might’ve missed some because there were so many ) The Cancellation I was going to make this final segment longer. I was reserving it for details regarding the ultimate outcome of the 2X chain-split. I was going to update this post-publishing once I had enough material after the fork to make a closing statement. I knew what I generally want to touch on and had a different title that might end up being applicable in the future: . I was going to talk about how miners clearly don’t act altruistically, or be allowed to signal their intent to support something within the protocol. How even though the hashpower will follow profitability, if a small group accumulates and controls a majority of the economic weight in a system they can have a serious impact on the price for a prolonged period of time, but not be a desirable chain for anyone but them. How if you invested in Bitcoin early enough you could be an illiquid trillionaire by now and move the entire market yourself. How theoretically someone could have stolen Satoshi’s keys, or Satoshi could be a 3-letter government agency. I was going to talk about how once you understand these implications then you’ll understand this: The Hashpower Follows The Price (but doesn’t define Bitcoin) and shouldn’t The market doesn’t determine Bitcoin either. This was until the email was sent on the 2X mailing list. Six people called off 2X. Six: The entire project was scrubbed after this email was sent out. The entire project was scrubbed after six people called off 2X. Six. https://twitter.com/francispouliot_/status/928352267073355776 Addendum I said I wouldn’t talk about Bitcoin but I can’t help myself. ‘Cash’ Bitcoin is not Bitcoin, the has said it multiple times already: ‘Cash’ creator Furthermore: Roger Ver is a scammer. Jihan Wu is power hungry. Craig Right is a fraud. Despite my opposition to all the people I’ve mentioned in this article, Them leaving to go use/run an alt-coin was the best thing that could have ever happened to Bitcoin. I refuse to extend any benefit of the doubt to these 3 people in respect to Bitcoin development. They don’t like me too much: Also Roger, your subreddit mods behavior couldn’t make things clearer. So much for your purported “free speech” forum: https://np.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/79w4lq/on_reaching_consensus_among_multiple_bitcoin/ Tomislav Dugandzic. David Shares. If you’ve ever listened to their advice: You’ve been scammed. Can’t wait for them to block me on Twitter as well. _The latest Tweets from 🅂🅃🄾🄿 (@StopAndDecrypt). Fullstack Social Engineer: 10% FUD, 20% memes, 15% concentrated…_twitter.com 🅂🅃🄾🄿 (@StopAndDecrypt) | Twitter craig wright is a fraud
