On Saturday (November 16), Bobby Lee, co-founder and former CEO of BTCC (formerly BTCChina), the first Bitcoin exchange in China, expressed regret over his support in 2017 for the hard fork proposal SegWit2x.
Bobby Lee, whose brother, Charlie Lee, is the creator of Litecoin (LTC), has long been a pioneer in the cryptocurrency industry. He recently founded a Las Vegas-headquartered startup called Ballet, which has developed the ballet hardware wallet (the startup calls this the “World’s FIRST Multicurrency Non-electronic Physical Wallet”).
On Saturday via a series of tweets, Lee expressed his regret over supporting SegWit2x, the proposal that aimed to increase the transaction throughput of the Bitcoin network by doubling the block size from 1MB to 2MB via a hard fork in November 2017.
SegWit2x was the second half of the Bitcoin Scaling Agreement at Consensus 2017, aka the New York Agreement (NYA), “a scaling proposal made jointly by over 50 companies.” This agreement “intended to put an end to Bitcoin’s long-lasting scaling debate by increasing the block capacity through activating Segregated Witness and then doubling the block size.”
Segregated Witness (SegWit), the first part of the NYA, was proposed (as a soft fork) in late 2015 by Bitcoin developer Pieter Wuille; it got activated on 24 August 2017. As for the highly controversial SegWit2X, although it had been planned for 16 November 2017, its proponents announced on 8 November 2017 that they had decided to not go ahead with this hard fork.
Lee started his tweetstorm by saying that he realizes now that it was “extremely dangerous & irresponsible to push for a contentious hard fork”:
2 years ago, I thought SegWit2x was the best path forward for Bitcoin. I‘ve since come to realize that it was extremely dangerous & irresponsible to push for a contentious hard fork w/o replay protection, esp. when there wasn’t consensus. Mea culpa!
Bitcoin is the real Bitcoin.— Bobby Lee – Ballet: Simple & Elegant Wallet (@bobbyclee) November 16, 2019
Next, he talked about his support for SegWit and native SegWit address format “Bech32” (described in Bitcoin Improvement Proposal 0173):
Today, I’m as strong a supporter of Bitcoin as ever. I’m also a big supporter of SegWit, and at @BalletCrypto we have full support for native SegWit bech32 addresses.
We encourage all other wallets & exchanges to support bech32 address format ASAP.
Live long & HODL Bitcoin.
— Bobby Lee – Ballet: Simple & Elegant Wallet (@bobbyclee) November 17, 2019
And when he was asked by one Twitter user what he thought about Bitcoin Cash, he replied:
In Bitcoin, there’s the notion of consensus where majority of hash power decides on the real chain.
Similarly in our world, the market decides on the real Bitcoin, the one with the most market value.
To me, it’s pretty obvious that the market has already decided.
Signal vs Noise.— Bobby Lee – Ballet: Simple & Elegant Wallet (@bobbyclee) November 17, 2019
