The Countdown to the Soft Fork Has Been Launched
Hey, remember the heated Hard Fork debates that took place two months ago? They're happening again and now they're serious.On August 1st, the endgame phase of the SegWit adoption battle will be taking place and Bitcoin community should decide how the currency will evolve.
What's happening?
Simply, Soft Fork is an update of the existing Bitcoin protocol in order to improve the effectiveness of transactions and the general network. Unlike Hard Fork, it won't necessarily lead to a mandatory split of the cryptocurrency.Two months ago, when the Bitcoin network was under a massive DDoS attack, a group of miners proposed to extend the standard 1Mb block by eight in order to increase the network capacity. The offer was rejected by the majority of the community and instead, they signaled a warmer attitude to the Segregated Witness (SegWit) adaptation.SegWit stands for the technological update to the classic BTC protocol. The two adoption scenarios currently available for the support of the community are as followed:
- BIP 141 (Segregated Witness) — This update excludes a lot of metadata from 1Mb block and in theory helps increase it by including more transaction data.
- SegWit2x (Intention) — Is mostly the same, meanwhile increasing the standard block size by 2Mb and not backwards compatible.
As you can see by the graph above, over 98% of nodes are signaling BIP 141 and this will likely be the scenario. However, almost 50% of nodes that support BIP 141 are still signaling a "prepared" status instead of a "support" status. This means they could potentially change their mind by August 1st.
