[Bitcoin-segwit2x] Require a new Statement from NYA companies

Wed Nov 1 23:55:37 UTC 2017

In order to safeguard the community from an undesired chain split, the 
upgrade should be overwhelming, but it’s not enough. It should also 
‘appear’ as overwhelming. People, businesses and services needs to be 
certain about what is going to happen and the risks if they won’t 
follow. My impression is that still too many speaking english people in 
the western world think the upgrade will be abandoned before or 
immediately after block 494784 is mined, thus they are going to simply 
ignore it. That could lead to unprepared patch up and confusion, while 
naïve users risk to harm themselves.
For this reason and for the sake of the Bitcoin community as a whole, we 
need to show again, clearly and publicly the extent of the support to 
SegWit2x. We also need to commit ourselves in a widespread communication 
campaign. I know this is not a strict technical matter, but it could 
help a lot avoiding technical issues in the future.

What we have to do:

First, we need a new statement from the original NYA signers and all the 
business, firms and individuals who joined the cause later. That 
statement should be slightly different from the original NYA though, and 
I am explaining why.
We all know that what Bitcoin is will be ultimately determined by market 
forces, comprehensive of all the stakeholders involved: businesses, 
miners, users, developers, traders, investors, holders etc. Each 
category has its own weight in the process, and everybody has incentives 
in following the market. If the market goes clearly towards a certain 
direction, in the long run no company will remain stuck to a position 
for barely ideological beliefs.
For this reason, it’s clear why some businesses communicate that they 
are going to support the chain which will better meet the market demand, 
independently from what they think is the best protocol solution or 
upgrade for Bitcoin.

For example, two signers of the NYA, SurBTC and Bitwala, recently stated 
that they completely subscribe to the technical changes proposed in the 
agreement for SegWit2x

SurBTC: “From a technical standpoint, we’ve always loved SegWit and we 
see a small increment (2mb) in the size of the block as a good idea as 
it would relieve pressure, lower fees and give some time to other more 
definitive scaling alternatives such as the Lightning Network to develop 
(https://blog.surbtc.com/our-stance-on-the-segwit2x-hard-fork-9fd04323667b)

Bitwala: “We urge all developers to take into account the demands of 
users and all parties of the NYA and address them adequately, if not 
implement them” (https://www.bitwala.com/bitwala-statement-segwit2x/)

Despite this, they said they cannot guarantee they will use the ticker 
BTC for SegWit2x coin. Bitwala states that they “would like to honor the 
agreement”, but they also depend on third party exchange and service 
payments (Xapo) and “must build our products on what they support”, so 
they won’t have an active role in the fork: “Everything else is up to 
the market”. Reading that statement no one can say Bitwala is not in 
favor to SegWit2x as a technical upgrade. Despite that, I also see 
people who misinterpreted the message and listed Bitwala among the NO2X 
companies. There are many companies deprecating a contentious upgrade, 
for this reason they move against SegWit2x hard fork, but that doesn’t 
always mean they oppose the upgrade in itself.

Many, including some Core developers, oppose the fork just because ‘they 
think’ it is contentious. But what if they are wrong? We can reasonably 
think companies are not eager to struggle against a big part of the 
industry, or put the network unity at risk, if S2X had no broad support. 
It’s fair. But first, companies have to express their opinion, second, 
they  see if it is shared by the rest of the community. Then, they can 
decide to pursue the upgrade or not. There is no point in opposing a 
proposal prima facie because the mere fact that it’s contentious, it 
would be simply illogical.

I would ask all business the following question:
“Would you favor a Bitcoin upgrade increasing the blocksize to 2mb by 
means of a hard fork from block number 494784, if this upgrade proposal 
proved to have broad support among the Bitcoin community?”
YES / NO

This way, we are able to identify exactly how many are in favor of the 
bare technical upgrade in itself, without political considerations. 
After we have a clear feedback, it’s left to individual companies and 
miners to read the response data in a political framework and decide if 
it’s an acceptable level of consensus. Thus each one will independently 
decide if it’s worthwhile pursuing the upgrade or not.
 From my search, I would say that at least the following companies are in 
favor of the upgrade (see the list below). I included the original NYA 
signers, plus the companies “blacklisted” by bitcoin.org[1] (and other 
companies who lately asked bitcoin.org to be included in the 
blacklist[2]), plus a few others retrieved from these lists[3] which 
weren’t mentioned yet. Please check the list and make amendments if 
something is wrong, which is likely since I could have missed the most 
recent statements of some companies.
I included also Wanyloans, Vaultoro, CryptoFacilities[4] and SurBTC[5], 
original signers of NYA that lately pulled their unconditioned support. 
Reading their statements, it seems they are not against the technical 
proposal in itself: they denounce the lack of replay protection, but 
it’s reasonable to complain about it only if the upgrade is likely to 
cause a split, which is a political matter. I excluded F2pool, since I 
think that supporting NYA “until july” implies that they simply never 
supported it.

1Hash
Abra
AntPool
ANX
Batpool
Bcoin
Bitangel.com
BitClub
Bitcoin.com
Bitex
bitFlyer
Bitfury
Bitgo
Bitmain
BitmainWarranty
BitOasis
BitPay
BitPesa
Bitso
Bitwala
Bixin.com
Blockchain.info
Bloq
BTC.com
BTC.TOP
BTCC
BTCPOP
BTER.com
BW.com
BX.in.th
Canoe
Circle
Civic
CKPool
Coinbase
Coinfucius ATM operator
Coins.ph
CryptoFacilities
Decentral
Digital Mint
Digital Currency Group
Fairlay
Filament
GBMiners
Genesis Global Trading
Genesis Mining
GoCoin
Grayscale Investments
Guy Corem
Jaxx
Kano
Korbit
Luno
Magnr
MONI
Netki
OB1
OKCoin
PTYcoin
Purse
Ripio
Safello
SFOX
ShapeShift
SurBTC
Unocoin
Vaultoro
Veem
ViaBTC
Wanyloans
Xapo
Yours

Our purpose is to extend this list as much as we can. In the following 
link, I discuss the technical and political reasons why everybody should 
subscribe. In the article, I treat different topics such as: technical 
aspects of segwit2x like hardware requirements and fee costs, timing and 
status of lightning network and other scalability solutions, bt1 vs bt2 
futures on bitfinex, the unethical move of bitcoin.org denouncing honest 
companies, the need of many different fullnode clients instead of a 
unique reference software in the ecosystem, and much more.
https://medium.com/@albertodeluigi/segwit2x-a-new-statement-42f3cf3b808f

Thank you

[1] https://bitcoin.org/en/posts/denounce-segwit2x and here 
https://bitcoin.org/en/alert/2017-10-09-segwit2x-safety
[2] https://github.com/bitcoin-dot-org/bitcoin.org/issues/1835
[3] http://segwit.party/nya/ and https://coin.dance/poli. From the first 
list, BitOasis is uncorrectly listed among the NYA withdrawn, you can 
read their statement here and nothing can make you think they are 
pulling support:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/75au0p/nya_signer_uae_company_bitoasis_wont_support_s2x/
The same holds for Bitwala: 
https://www.bitwala.com/bitwala-statement-segwit2x/
[4] It’s not a public communication: https://i.redd.it/e9x15k6bmmpz.png
[5] 
https://blog.surbtc.com/our-stance-on-the-segwit2x-hard-fork-9fd04323667b