Jihan Wu and Eric Lombrozo are trading accusations of broken promises in private. The Bitmain CEO and Bitcoin Core developer have exhausted attempts to find common ground. Wu backs SegWit2x, which wo
Jihan Wu and Eric Lombrozo are trading accusations of broken promises in private. The Bitmain CEO and Bitcoin Core developer have exhausted attempts to find common ground.
Wu backs SegWit2x, which would raise the block size limit. Lombrozo's camp backs BIP 148, a user-activated push for Segregated Witness without larger blocks. If both sides hold their position, Bitcoin could split into two networks on August 1 or sometime later when SegWit2x attempts its hard fork.
Wu spoke with Bitsonline about the backstory. In early 2016, miners, exchanges, and Bitcoin Core developers reached the Hong Kong Agreement: activate SegWit and raise the non-witness data limit to 2MB, which would expand blocks to 4 or 8MB. That summer, Chinese miners traveled to California to meet with Bitcoin Core's development team.
"At that [meeting], we got kind of the impression that the block size was about to be increased after SegWit," Wu said. "Based on that context, I said, 'Okay, let's do SegWit and increase the block size [via a hard fork].'"
Wu treats this as a sign of good faith rather than a binding contract. But then he watched Greg Maxwell, the CTO of Blockstream and a Bitcoin Core contributor, post on Reddit.
"You could see that he was so [supportive of] small blocks, even after the California meeting," Wu said. "I think that [Maxwell's] behaviour were more aligned with what he said publicly than what he said privately because in the California private conversations Greg Maxwell is generally very okay with increasing the block size. But when it comes to the public, he is very, very [much a] small blocker."
Wu expected Scaling Bitcoin Milan to announce the hard fork increase. None came.
Lombrozo disputes this account. "Code for a hard fork was all that was asked for, and it was provided," he told MiningPool. "But getting people to run it is a different matter. I honestly don't know how to satisfy Jihan [Wu's] demands at this point. There seems to be either a clash of cultures or some ulterior motives."
Lombrozo also pushes back against the notion that the divide is East-West. Bitcoin businesses and the cypherpunk developers building the protocol itself are the two camps at odds, in his view.
Wu's stance is unwavering: "I think we should stick to the Hong Kong agreement. If there's no block size increase, then there's no SegWit." He held this position back in May as well.
On the UASF and BIP 148 path, Wu is dismissive. "The UASF, I think, does not have any traction in this community," he said. "I think the recent implementation of btc1 is doing the UASF guys a favor that will have saved them from forking to their own smaller chain."
Over 60 percent of the network's mining power is signalling for SegWit through BIP 91, a mechanism built into SegWit2x. Wu points to this backing from major economic players as evidence SegWit2x will activate.
Wu declines to forecast the coming months. "My opinion is that everything is possible right now," he said. "It's very hard for me to make a kind of prediction, but we should pay attention to that SegWit2x has lots of economic players [in support] of this agreement."
