Yesterday, on August 1st, we marked one year since the launch of the User-Activated Soft Fork (UASF) that made it possible to activate Segregated Witness (SegWit), a solution to the problems of scalability and information management in the Bitcoin (BTC) blockchain. During that time, Bitcoin Cash (BCH) emerged.
As a result of this community decision, Bitcoin (BTC) main network was the scene of a fork from which the Bitcoin Cash (BCH) broke off, a token whose promoters wanted to position as the “real” Bitcoin. The disagreement over the size of the blocks generated was the primary trigger for this proposal.
It has been described as Independence Day, as the users of the leading cryptocurrency in the market imposed their criteria to the attempt to stop this improvement by the promoters of the increase in the size of the blocks.
From the beginning, the developers of the protocol advocated the application of SegWit via UASF, while the promoters of Bitcoin Cash (BCH) and, among them Jihan Wu, CEO of the mining equipment manufacturing company, Bitmain, bet on the application of a hard-fork where the capacity of the blocks would be considerably increased.
Yesterday we marked one year since the User-Activated Soft Fork (UASF) that gave birth to SegWit and Bitcoin Cash (BCH)
Pieter Wuille presented this scalability solution during the Scaling Bitcoin conference in Hong Kong in 2016. The update was received with reluctance, but when the implementation and signaling of SegWit became more evident, the proposal was accepted.
The great debate over the size of the blocks as a potential solution to scalability caused the community to split up. The leading promoters of the hard-fork signed an agreement in New York, with which they signed the need for the modification to take place.
Additionally to Bitmain and Roger Ver, other actors such as Huobi, BTCCPool, Bitmain, F2Pool, BTCTop, ViaBTC, BiXin, BW, 1Hash, Canoe, BATPool, and Bitkan had signed this document, despite the fact that the group opposing the proposal was much larger.
One of the main turning points is that this modification followed a mandatory scheme to change the node’s software, overriding the blocks generated before its activation. However, the Bitcoin (BTC) community decided to give in to SegWit and its User-Activated Soft Fork (UASF) scheme.
