"Segwit2x" canceled

[ClaytonB]

News is a couple days old... but relevant: TechCrunch

Segwit2x would have caused a "hard fork" of Bitcoin's blockchain and would have resulted in some serious problems for non-savvy Bitcoin users, especially what is called a "replay attack". Joe is a non-savvy Bitcoin user who does not understand the difference between standard Bitcoin and Bitcoin2x. He buys something with his forked bitcoins on the Bitcoin2x network. But since the transaction he submits to Bitcoin2x network contains all the information required to spend his bitcoins on the standard Bitcoin network, Hacker McHackface comes along and spends Joe's regular bitcoins on the standard Bitcoin network. When Joe comes along later to find out what has happened to his regular bitcoins, he is astonished to find that they're simply gone.

Anyway, it's a good thing that Segwit2x is dead.

[kpitcher]

News is a couple days old... but relevant: TechCrunch

Segwit2x would have caused a "hard fork" of Bitcoin's blockchain and would have resulted in some serious problems for non-savvy Bitcoin users, especially what is called a "replay attack". Joe is a non-savvy Bitcoin user who does not understand the difference between standard Bitcoin and Bitcoin2x. He buys something with his forked bitcoins on the Bitcoin2x network. But since the transaction he submits to Bitcoin2x network contains all the information required to spend his bitcoins on the standard Bitcoin network, Hacker McHackface comes along and spends Joe's regular bitcoins on the standard Bitcoin network. When Joe comes along later to find out what has happened to his regular bitcoins, he is astonished to find that they're simply gone.

Anyway, it's a good thing that Segwit2x is dead.

I worry about the transaction capacity being full and the transaction cost being a few dollars instead of pennies in order to get high enough in the queue to go through.

Right now there are 98179 uncomfirmed transactions
https://blockchain.info/unconfirmed-transactions


This just kicked the problem down the road

[ClaytonB]

I worry about the transaction capacity being full and the transaction cost being a few dollars instead of pennies in order to get high enough in the queue to go through.

Right now there are 98179 uncomfirmed transactions
https://blockchain.info/unconfirmed-transactions


This just kicked the problem down the road

Yes, those are serious problems. Segwit2x was not the solution to those problems, however. The time and energy that was being wasted on trying to increase the block size could have been better spent implementing Lightning Networks, a technology that the blockchain already supports today. LN will enable Bitcoin to support dozens of times more transaction capacity than a simple doubling of the blocksize could ever have supported, without it. That's why Segwit2x was the wrong solution.