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On Monday, bearish pressure took Bitcoin price to as low as $6948, only to bring bulls back in the game. At the time of writing, Bitcoin has gained a whopping 6.21% in the past 24 hours, taking the cryptocurrency to trade at $7512, which translates into a $125 billion market cap.
The market continues to show support for the original Bitcoin blockchain over SegWit2x. There is growing opposition to the upcoming hard fork, which is now looking highly unlikely to succeed in updating the original chain to a new rule set without creating another asset.
Creator of Litecoin, Charlie Lee, revealed that Nick Szabo – a blockchain, bitcoin, and smart contracts pioneer – whom the bitcoin community considers as a figure closest to Satoshi Nakamoto, has publicly expressed his opposition against SegWit2x.
Increasing opposition to SegWit2x will most likely translate into the splitting of the original blockchain, just like we witnessed with Bitcoin Cash hard fork. This will also lead to creating free SegWit2x coins, which is why traders are hoarding onto Bitcoin until the hard fork.
This battle between SegWit2x supporters and the Bitcoin community is more than just about the size of blocks. It has to do with how SegWit2x plans to update new rule set on the original chain — beginning with closed-source development, an opaque agreement made between a restricted group of businesses, developers, and miners, and the SegWit2x development team’s refusal to implement strong replay protection.
Therefore, the demand for SegWit2x and support for the software has declined in the past few weeks, even from the mining community. Hashrate support for SegWit2x is on the decline.
It is important to note that despite predictions of a split, Segwit2x may not yield the benefits that Bitcoin holders enjoyed with the creation of Bitcoin cash in August.
PS: If you’re not familiar with Nick Szabo, his podcast with Tim Ferriss and Naval Ravikant talks a lot about his achievements: https://tim.blog/2017/06/04/nick-szabo/
Top Stories from the Crypto World
1. A major vulnerability found in Parity
Parity Technologies, the company behind widely used wallet service Parity, today disclosed an issue that could enable the contents of a wallet to be wiped.
As it turns out a user suicided the library-turned-into-wallet, wiping out the library code which in turn rendered all multi-sig contracts unusable since their logic (any state-modifying function) was inside the library.
To put it simply, the codebase for accessing Parity multi-sig wallets is currently deleted, rendering funds out of reach. The multi-sig security has turned into a liability for multiple Parity businesses and private users. Irony much?
A good thing to know: Back in July, a vulnerability in Parity led to 150,000 ETH (then worth around $30 million) being stolen.
2. We’ll tame Bitcoin, says CME Group’s Leo Melamed
CME Group’s chairman emeritus Leo Melamed has said Bitcoin will likely come to trade in a similar way to how gold and stocks are exchanged today.
The derivatives giant last week announced plans to launch a Bitcoin futures contract, aiming to have the product available by the end of the year. Although, the product is still contingent on approval from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.
“We will regulate, make bitcoin not wild, nor wilder. We’ll tame it into a regular type instrument of trade with rules.” Melamed added.
3. SIA and R3 team up for Blockchain finance app network
Technology infrastructure provider SIA Group and distributed ledger technology (DLT) consortium R3 have teamed up in an effort to get banks and corporates using blockchain applications.
Under the partnership, blockchain apps based on R3’s Corda technology will be available for clients over a new “secure and protected” 600 node network to be built by SIA.
Massimo Arrighetti, CEO of SIA Group, said:
“We will integrate on SIAchain, which rests on roughly 600 nodes of the SIAnet network throughout Europe, the most advanced technologies available and we will develop innovative applications for financial institutions, corporates, and public sector.“