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IPFS News Link • Bitcoin

Relief and Disbelief: Bitcoin Reacts to Sudden '2x' Suspension

• https://www.coindesk.com

The tweets came fast and furious, almost quicker than the articulation.

After months of anger and debate, a group of businesses and mining firms that use bitcoin's software to provide services suddenly shuttered an attempt at changing its rules. Scheduled to be introduced in mid-November, the Segwit2x software had emerged as a controversial bogeyman, a cloud of uncertainty over bitcoin's future, that quickly gave way.

Among those who had for months spoken out against the proposal, and what they perceived as a broken understanding of how protocol development should proceed, euphoria was evident.

"Segwit2x hardfork has been called off! Common sense prevails," exclaimed litecoin creator Charlie Lee. "Put a fork in it, it's done," tweeted author Andreas Antonopoulos.

Developer Akin Fernandez, one of a legion of bloggers who have stood staunchly against the proposal, tweeted succinctly:

"Bitcoin wins."

Indeed, the strongest voices in the initial reaction were those who had joined a long-simmering protest movement called "NO2X," which accumulated the support of dozens of companies and users, who displayed their opposition by adding a prefix to their social media names.

The social media behavior, launched in the wake of Segwit2x's announcement in May, did much to highlight the differing perspectives of the proposal.

An open-source software that requires a diversity of stakeholders to agree to its rules to operate – bitcoin's major companies, developers and mining pools have each taken a different view of development and how decisions about updates should be made.


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