HARD FORK BITCOIN: NO, IT'S NOT THE SEGWIT2X THAT WE WOULD EXPECT

A few days ago, a group of developers had indicated that it was good, despite its cancellation, set up the SegWit2X hard fork. However, this one is very different from the one that had been planned a few months ago, and it seems that it is only a "coup" marketing intended to highlight an umpteenth fork. It should take place today, at block 501 451.

The return of SegWit2x
The SegWit2x hard fork had the ambition to offer bigger blocks, at 2 MB, that would allow to deal with the increase in the number of transactions made on the network.

However, even if the signatories of the New York Agreement could include important players in the ecosystem such as Digital Currency Group, Coinbase, ShapeShift or Xapo, this proposal had created strong divisions within the community. The group had finally decided last November 9 to cancel this controversial hard fork, to put an end to the war that tore the ecosystem.

A few days ago, a group of developers said they planned to "resurrect" SegWit2x, explaining that the transaction fees made Bitcoin "impossible to use [...] as a means of payment."

This fork should take place this Thursday, December 28, at block 501 451.

The price of the futures contract on SegWit2x had reacted strongly following this announcement, and had crossed the threshold of 1200 dollars Wednesday morning. He had since relapsed, and he exchanged, at the time of writing this article, $ 700.

A "perfect Bitcoin" ... or an "altcoin" disguised?
If we look more closely at SegWit2x (B2X), we see that it is not intended to update the Bitcoin protocol, but rather to create a "altcoin" very different.

First of all, the development teams were not the ones who had led the original project, led by Jeff Garzik, a former Bitcoin Core developer.

This is what we could see on Twitter:

Then, the developers plan to implement a protection against the attacks of replay protection ("replay protection") - which was not the case of the B2X which had been envisaged by the signatories of the New York Agreement.

One can also wonder about the "first" that will involve this fork B2X. On the site dedicated to the project, developers say they plan to take the B2X, explaining that they can then be distributed to "those who support the network" - without providing additional details.

Finally, the characteristics of this SegWit2x protocol will be radically different from those of Bitcoin. The network will be secured using X11 encryption (against SHA-256 for Bitcoin), with a block time of 2.5 minutes (against 10 minutes).

The difficulty will be recalculated after each block, and the site evokes the implementation of the zkSNARK technology in order to make the transactions anonymous.

But the most amazing is perhaps elsewhere. Rather than bringing the size of the blocks to 2 MB, as the name suggests, B2X is actually to offer blocks four times larger than those of Bitcoin, 4 MB.

By adding to all these elements the rush of developers, who have programmed this fork only a few days after its announcement, the community has every reason to be skeptical about the project. And even though the B2X developers recently told the CCN site that they wanted to "revive SegWit2x", and that it was the same fork that was canceled at the end of November, "but with improved features ".

How to receive "forked currencies"? The rule is simple:

If your corners are stored on a platform (Coinbase, Bittrex, Binance), it is she who "controls" your Bitcoins. It will decide if it will give you the new currency, based on the number of BTCs you had at the time of the fork
If your corners are stored on a wallet where you have the private keys (Electrum, Ledger Nano S, ...), you will have the possibility to recover the new cryptocurrency - either by using your current wallet or by turning to a wallet compatible with this fork.
However, we recommend that you exercise great caution, and not compromise your private keys by providing them on a site or a wallet different from the one you are used to.

As we have seen recently with Bitcoin Gold, the official site of a fork can perfectly put forward a litigious wallet, intended to steal Bitcoins from people who use it. The best approach is not to rush into these new forks, and wait to see how things evolve.

You can turn to Ledger's hardware portfolios - the company recently said it would try to allow users to claim all of the "forked currencies" it deems legitimate.