As the debate over bitcoin’s block size scaling heats up, bitcoin mining pool viaBTC is not budging on its stance that Segregated Witnesses (SegWit) cannot solve the network’s capacity problem.F2Pool recently surprised the community when it announced that it had begun signaling for SegWit, a controversial proposal that seeks to boost the blockchain’s transaction capacity while facilitating layer two protocols.However, F2Pool’s decision didn’t trigger a price reaction in bitcoin, indicating that the market doesn’t think the Chinese mining pool’s announcement has caused any change.F2Pool has around 9 percent network hardware share, but SegWit still requires the support of 65 percent of miners.viaBTC refuses to join bandwagon Unlike F2Pool, viaBTC has publicly reiterated that it will not support Segwit for a number of reasons.viaBTC ranks among the top mining pools in the world and has recently raised $2.91 million to launch a new global bitcoin exchange.In a post on Medium, the bitcoin mining pool pointed out that “even if SegWit after activation can slightly scale up block size with new transaction formats, it’s still far behind the demand for the development of bitcoin network.” The main goal of SegWit is to send transactions off-chain and onto second layers like the Lightning Network or sidechains, which viaBTC said “are not equal to bitcoin’s peer-to-peer on-chain transactions,” noting that “LN will also lead to big payment ‘centers,’ and this is against bitcoin’s initial design as a peer-to-peer payment system.” SegWit has a lot of issues, but the main criticism against the proposal is its use of a 1:4 ratio, which some miners pointed out as a political decision that will bind bitcoin’s trajectory for years regardless of technical factors.

“SegWit lifts the block size limit to 4MB with 1MB base and 3MB witness block.However, from the current transaction data, the average effective block size will be less than 2MB even if all transactions upgrade to SegWit.This is a tremendous waste,” viaBTC said.“If we want to double the capacity of Bitcoin, we’ll need to make sure the internet bandwidth to run full nodes can support at least 8MB blocks, instead of 2MB.ethereum liteThis will make it even tougher to increase block size in the future.” The decision to upgrade to SegWit is also irreversible, the mining pool said.tesla bitcoin miner“On technical terms, SegWit uses a transaction format that can be spent by those who don’t upgrade their nodes, with segregation of transaction data and signature data.ubuntu bitcoin remove

This means SegWit is irrevocable once it’s activated, or all unspent transactions in SegWit formats will face the risk of being stolen,” viaBTC said.Bitcoin Unlimited focuses on the ‘most dire’ problem With bitcoin running at full capacity for months, numerous proposals have been put forward—and rejected—by miners.The latest proposals are SegWit, with about 32 percent hashrate share, and Bitcoin Unlimited, which saw its hashrate signaling support more than double from 16 percent to 35 percent over the past month.ViaBTC is among the pools supporting Bitcoin Unlimited, which unlike SegWit, simply wants to increase the block size as set by nodes and miners.In an interview with Bitcoin Magazine, ViaBTC CEO Haipo Yang described SegWit as “a solution for malleability, but not one for the most urgent block scaling issue.” “We support Bitcoin Unlimited because it focuses on the most dire problem.And a well-planned hard fork can also resolve malleability issues in a simple and safe way,” Yang said.

Yang is not alone in the fight to stay true to bitcoin’s original ideology—a decentralized digital currency that will help everyone move out from the comforting arms of the banks.Bitcoin news site CoinGeek recently put up a poll for its readers, 73.33 percent of whom voted for “I’m Unlimited, Baby,” while 13.33 percent were for “I’m a Core believer” camp.The price of bitcoin has surpassed the $1,200 level during Thursday morning’s trading.Bitcoin's long-lasting scaling debate appeared to be heading toward a climax lately, with two proposals gaining significant traction.At one end of the fence there is Bitcoin Improvement Proposal 148 (BIP148), a user activated soft fork (UASF) originally proposed by the pseudonymous developer "shaolinfry."On the other, there's SegWit2x , an agreement forged between a significant number of Bitcoin companies and miners.The good news is that both of these proposals have a short-term solution in common: both plan to activate Segregated Witness (SegWit) this summer.

The bad news is that the activation method of the two has differed, which could lead to a coin-split .As of today, it seems this schism will be avoided - at least initially.The SegWit2x development team plans to implement BIP91 , a proposal by Bitmain Warranty engineer James Hilliard that cleverly makes the two conflicting activation methods compatible.The current implementation of Segregated Witness is defined by BIP141 .This version is included in the latest Bitcoin Core releases, and is widely deployed on the Bitcoin network.BIP141 is activated through the activation method defined by BIP9.This means that 95 percent of all blocks within a two-week period need to include a piece of data: "bit 1."This indicates that a miner is ready for the upgrade.As such, SegWit would be activated if the vast majority of miners are ready for it.Or that was the intention.So far, only some 30 percent of hash power is signaling support for the upgrade.There is a lot of speculation as to why this is the case, but it almost certainly has nothing to do with (a lack of) readiness.

That's why other activation methods are increasingly being considered.BIP148 is a user activated soft fork (UASF), specifically designed to trigger BIP141.On August 1st, anyone running Bitcoin software that implemented BIP148 will start rejecting all blocks that do not include bit 1, the SegWit signalling data.This means that if a mere majority of miners (by hash power) runs this software, they will reject all blocks from the minority of miners that does not.As a result, this majority of miners will always have the longest valid chain according to all Bitcoin nodes on the network.Consequently, all deployed BIP141 nodes will see a chain that includes over 95 percent of bit 1 blocks, meaning SegWit would be activated on the network.However, if BIP148 is not supported by a majority of miners (by hash power), Bitcoin's blockchain could split in two.In that case, there would effectively be two types of Bitcoin, where one activated BIP148 and the other did not.This may resolve over time - or it may not.

SegWit2x (also referred to as "SegWit2MB" or "the Silbert Accord"), is the scaling agreement reached by a numer of Bitcoin companies and over 80 percent of miners (by hash power), drafted just before the Consensus 2017 conference.For some time, the details surrounding SegWit2x were not very specific.As the name suggests, all that was really known was that SegWit was included in the agreement, and that it included a hard fork to double Bitcoin's "base block size" to two megabytes.And, of course, SegWit was meant to be implemented using a different activation method.Like the original BIP141 proposal, SegWit2x was to be activated by miners through hash power.But where BIP141 requires 95 percent hash power support, SegWit2x would only require 80 percent.Moreover, SegWit2x readiness would be signaled using another piece of activation data: "bit 4" instead of "bit 1."This makes SegWit2x largely incompatible with BIP141, and especially with BIP148: Different nodes would be looking at different activation bits, meaning they could activate SegWit under different circumstances and at different times; and that would mess up SegWit-specific block relay policy between nodes, potentially fracturing the network.

Now, it seems BIP91 has provided the solution.BIP91 is a proposal by Bitmain Warranty (not to be confused with Bitmain ) engineer James Hilliard which was specifically designed to prevent a coin-split by making SegWit2x and BIP148 compatible.The proposal resembles BIP148 to some extent.Upon activation of BIP91, all BIP91 nodes will reject any blocks that do not signal support for SegWit through bit 1.As such, if a majority of miners (by hash power) run BIP91, the longest valid Bitcoin chain will consist of SegWit-signaling blocks only , and all regular BIP141 SegWit nodes will activate the protocol upgrade.Where BIP91 differs from BIP148 is that it doesn't have a set activation date, but is instead triggered by hash power.BIP91 nodes will reject any non-SegWit signalling blocks if, and only if, 80 percent of blocks first indicate within two days that's what they'll do.This indication is done with bit 4.As such, the Silbert Accord can technically be upheld - 80 percent hash power activation with bit 4 - while at the same time activating the existing SegWit proposal.