After a year and a half of debate with no compromise reached, supporters of on-chain scaling, have, seemingly, decided to unilaterally hardfork.
A new subreddit, r/btcfork, was announced earlier today, quickly gaining attention and momentum with numerous threads published in just hours after the announcement was made and many bitcoiners joining in the lively debate.
It is not clear when the client will launch. The developers are not publicly known, save for by nickname. Freetrader, one of the developers, who, seemingly, is now joined by other coders in a grassroots manner, stated that he could not give a time estimate of when the client was to be launched, but, we should expect it within weeks.
This has never been done before, therefore new grounds are being broken. One question is whether to simply fork while maintaining the current miners, or fire them all in a proof of work fork. This leaves room for miners to influence the decision in the next few days, but both options have risks. Faced with their silence, one can expect the latter option to prevail, however, the dominant choice seems to be providing two clients, one with proof of work change and one without and leave the decision to the free market, meaning, there would be three coins, Bitcoin Core, Bitcoin Original, and Bitcoin Evolved.
The code has, however, not yet been released, therefore, no decision has been made, but, either option is likely to find huge support within the ecosystem as bitcoin shows its full unstoppable power for its decentralized nature ensures that all it takes is for one person to release the code/client with the free market quickly joining to pass judgement.
The fork is likely to face resistance, but, all current bitcoin users will have coins on both chains and the decentralized nature of bitcoin makes such fork impossible to stop for anyone can fork any chain at any time. Moreover, the support for Nakamoto’s vision runs deep throughout the community, crossing any divide, with both bitcoin core and on-chain scaling supporters likely to call for the decision to be left to the free market and thus end this, almost, 8-year long debate, with history alone standing as a judge of who was right and who wrong.
https://www.cryptocoinsnews.com/bitcoin-to-hardfork/
