Over the past few months, the price of Bitcoin has seen a promising upward trend, but there have been doubts within the community as to what the future of the currency might look like. Many of these doubts were a result of the upcoming SegWit2x fork, which has been a divisive topic for the cryptocurrency community.The SegWit2x fork was expected to happen sometime in the very near future, but a recent statement has announced the fork will not be going forward for the time being.Proponents of the fork claim that it was a necessary solution for Bitcoin’s issues of scalability, claiming that a blocksize increase is an important part of future-proofing the currency and reducing transaction fees.Critics, however, cited the fork as an unnecessary point of division within the community.SegWit2x would have increased the blocksize to 2MBs, whereas for now the Bitcoin blocksize will remain at 1MB for the foreseeable future. In a surprising email signed by former proponents of the fork: Mike Belshe, Wences Casares, Jihan Wu, Jeff Garzik, Peter Smith and Erik Voorhees, Belshe stated: “As fees rise on the blockchain, we believe it will eventually become obvious that on-chain capacity increases are necessary. When that happens, we hope the community will come together and find a solution, possibly with a blocksize increase. Until then, we are suspending our plans for the upcoming 2MB upgrade.”The email also acknowledged the criticisms held by many members of the Bitcoin community as a reason for the fork being suspended indefinitely, stating: “Our goal has always been a smooth upgrade for Bitcoin. Although westrongly believe in the need for a larger blocksize, there is something webelieve is even more important: keeping the community together.Unfortunately, it is clear that we have not built sufficient consensus fora clean blocksize upgrade at this time. Continuing on the current pathcould divide the community and be a setback to Bitcoin’s growth.”With the fork suspended, it would appear that the Bitcoin community have been granted a moment of temporary relief from the impending uncertainty that would have been created by dividing the community. The results of the announcement is still to be determined, as the currency’s value briefly skyrocketed and has since crashed back down since the news broke a couple hours ago.Image credit: Bitcoin.org
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