You may have noticed the increase in news, opinions, messages, rants and memes of Segwit2x circulating in various media sources. You may have seen some of these media and you have completely lost, as if you were reading a different language.
The whole debate can become quite technical and you may wonder if the number of rants you see on r / bitcoin regarding the pitchfork. To make Segwit2x clear, I will break down the hardfork and put it in simple terms.
Bitcoin Legacy
Today we will call the Bitcoin version "Bitcoin inheritance". a limit of 1 MB to the size of the blocks. This was done by Satoshi to prevent network nodes from being attacked when Bitcoin was very young. He chose 1 MB as the limit because the blocks were 99% empty at that time, and he was expecting that there would be enough time to upgrade the system later when necessary. many transactions to deal with as transactions began to pile up and form a queue. The blocks are discovered about every ten minutes, but in ten minutes there was more than 1 MB of transactions, which delayed some until a future, empty block could be exploited. .
the time required to audit a transaction and the pressure exerted on the shippers in a transaction to increase their transaction costs (tx). These fees encourage minors to include this transaction in the current block. As the blocks filled up, the costs to be included in a new block increased proportionately. Bitcoin transactions began to become very expensive, if shippers paid higher or very slow fees, if shippers chose to pay lower fees.
The solution: Segwit
Core Bitcoin developers finally have a solution: Separate Witness (SegWit). SegWit is included in the current Bitcoin software. It works by separating transaction data from signature data, which can hold up to four times more transactions in a block. More importantly, SegWit some other bugs in the software that paves the way for future potential network upgrades like the lightning network.
So what is Segwit2x?
Just implement SegWit and increase the maximum size of the Bitcoin blocks. This would give the network a greater margin of growth during the deployment of the lightning rod network. Core Bitcoin developers do not want to increase the size of the block, mainly because it involves a hard, potentially dangerous fork. A hard fork occurs when computers running new versions of the software are no longer compatible with computers running the older version (older version). If this is not done correctly, it can cause very bad things.
On May 23, 2017, Digital Devise Group published the New York Agreement (NYA). The New York Agreement was signed by a large number of Bitcoin companies and by miners accounting for more than 80% of Bitcoin's hashpower. The signatories of the agreement have accepted a compromise called SegWit2x. This plan would require near-immediate activation of SegWit, and would follow that with a hard fork in November to double the size of the block.
Replay Protection
One of the main concerns of people is that SegWit2x does not provide replay protection (until recently, when Jeff Garzik, the development supervisor of SegWitx, introduced an opt-in replay protection scheme).
A replay attack works as follows. After a fork, if Bob sends 10 Bitcoins to Alice on the forked chain, an attacker can copy this transaction to the inherited chain and cause Bob to send 10 Bitcoins on this chain as well. Because SegWit2x does not include replay protection – unless you choose to do it – the Segwit2x fork leaves users vulnerable to a replay attack.
What's wrong with the forks?
arrives too quickly (three months after the implementation of SegWit) and that for a hardfork to take place and be accepted, it takes a lot of time to prepare the community and reach consensus on the fork. Many crypto community members do not like ranges because hard forks weaken what is supposed to be a united, decentralized community (I know, a bit ironic).
Delimitation
SegWit2x is a hard fork will be held around November 16, 2017, and because of the hardfork there will be two channels, one will be bitcoin core (bitcoin inheritance) and the other will be the SegWit2x version of Bitcoin. If the fork continues to be supported by the overwhelming majority of miners, there will be a lot of confusion on the chain that is the "real" Bitcoin.
Although people in the crypto community love to panic and meditate on the medium. com, reddit.com, and twitter.com, there's really no reason to worry about this next fork. Remember, there will never be more than 21 million Bitcoin – Bitcoin is a limited resource – a deflationary currency. Once the dust settles, everything will be fine.
However, for security reasons, it is always best to keep your own private key. This safety precaution should be taken into account especially during a hard range. If you hold your funds on a hosted online wallet, like an exchange like Coinbase, you never know what will happen to your funds if things go wrong on their servers – and we all know things sometimes go wrong. wrong.