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The chances of a materialization of the SegWit2x minority fork seem slim because the software compatible with the fork seems to be bombarded by bugs the day of the planned activation of the fork.
While SegWit2x was "canceled" by its main defenders last week, a small percentage of miners continued to report the fork, leaving the door open for the fork to continue anyway. The probability was minor – and the chain probably would not survive long – but the threat was serious enough for Coinbase to release an update yesterday informing its users of potential post-fork scenarios . Therefore, all eyes were on the bitcoin blockchain as she was approaching block 494784 – the supposed trigger of the fork.
However, the BTC1 nodes – nodes developed to be compatible with the SegWit2x chain – were blocked at blockheight 494782, although the main blockchain continued to add blocks.
John Newbery, a developer of a Chaincode Labs, attributed hiccups to an "off-by-one" error, noting that the associated piece of code was committed in the base code of BTC1 without opinion.
Looking at the code, it appears that Jeff made a mistake at random. This is not totally surprising. The code for VersionBitsState () is confusing, and the commit where Jeff added the fork code did not notice: https://t.co/LoJQx0Q7Bv.
– John Newbery (@jfnewbery) November 17, 2017
However, senior SegWit2x developer Jeff Garzik said the nodes were working as expected. Since the bitcoin genesis block has a height of "0", block 494783 is technically counted as block 494784th.
This is the 494784th block from scratch.
– Jeff Garzik (@jgarzik) November 17, 2017
Therefore, the nodes are blocked at blockheight 494782 while they expect a block of more than 1 MB to extract. Garzik says that "no one cancels [the] the fork canceled", so the chain will continue indefinitely to sit at 494782.
Nevertheless, the official announcement of SegWit2x did not make it clear that the bifurcation would take place at 494784th block – not block 494784. As several critics of SegWit2x have pointed out on Twitter, this confusion could have caused exchanges of bitcoins and other third parties. Custodial services must take "snapshots" in the wrong place to determine how many rooms each client should receive after the spur.
Jeff still claims that it's fine, since the nodes would still follow if the miners mined a bigger block at 494,783, but another problem is that all the exchanges would have taken a snapshot at the wrong block. https://t.co/oXhD3DCn24
– WhalePanda (@WhalePanda) November 17, 2017
But the problems do not stop there. There was apparently also a bug with the extraction software that prevented the miners from triggering the fork by exploiting a block of more than 1 MB. This bug was also spotted by Newbery, and Garzik released an update to work around this problem. Newbery claims to have identified more errors in the BTC1 code base, but he says that he will not reveal them since he has "no intention of helping to create a disruptive fork. "
There are more bugs in the code btc1. I can not, in all conscience, reveal what it is, because I do not have the intention to help create a disruptive fork.
– John Newbery (@jfnewbery) November 17, 2017
In all cases, the markets are concerned that the SegWit2x promoters will create a viable blockchain. Yesterday, SegWit2x futures traded at over $ 200 on Bitfinex. It was much lower than it had been before its "suspension", but higher than the value of Bitcoin Gold – a range that has already been deployed and that is actively operating as a crypto separate currency. At the moment, SegWit2x futures are valued at only $ 130, which represents a drop of almost 50% over 24 hours.