Just a few days back, Bitcoin Roundtable, a community of bitcoin businesses, exchanges, wallets, miners, and mining pools, released a letter rejecting “contentious” hard-fork proposal and coming out in support of Segregated Witness.

The group has now released a post on Medium saying that it will develop a safe hard-fork based on the improvements in SegWit.

The post has been signed off by Antpool, A-XBT, Bitcoin Association, Hong Kong, Bitfinex, BitFury, Bitmain, BitmainWarranty, Bit-X Exchange, Blockcloud, BTCC, BW, Coinfloor,F2Pool, Genesis Mining, HaoBTC, Huobi, Ledger, LIGHTNINGASIC & BitExchange, OKCoin and Spondoolies-Tech. In addition, bitcoin core contributors - Cory Fields, Johnson Lau, Luke Dashjr, Matt Corallo, Peter Todd; Kang Xie, Bitcoin Roundtable; and Adam Back have also signed the post.

It says that the representatives from the bitcoin industry and members of the development community understand that SegWit continues to be developed as a soft-fork and is likely to proceed towards release over the next two months. The group says that it will continue to work with the entire Bitcoin protocol development community to develop, in public, a “safe hard-fork based on the improvements in SegWit”.

“The Bitcoin Core contributors present at the Bitcoin Roundtable will have an implementation of such a hard-fork available as a recommendation to Bitcoin Core within three months after the release of SegWit”, it added.

The post said that the hard-fork is expected to include features including an increase in the non-witness data to be around 2 MB, with the total size no more than 4 MB. It emphasized that the proposal will only be adopted with broad support across the entire Bitcoin community. It further said:

• “We will run a SegWit release in production by the time such a hard-fork is released in a version of Bitcoin Core.
• We will only run Bitcoin Core-compatible consensus systems, eventually containing both SegWit and the hard-fork, in production, for the foreseeable future.
• We are committed to scaling technologies which use block space more efficiently, such as Schnorr multisig.”

Speaking of the timeline, it said that SegWit is expected to be released in April 2016 and accordingly the code for the hard-fork will be available by July 2016.

“If there is strong community support, the hard-fork activation will likely happen around July 2017”, it added.

Bitcoin price reacted positively to the announcement, soaring to 447.99 levels yesterday, before closing at 438.50 levels. BTC/USD currently trades at 435.26 levels at the time of writing.

Bitcoin Community Reacts

Brian Armstrong, co-founder and CEO of Coinbase, took to Medium to express his views. Speaking of the proposal as “too little, too late”, he said that July 2017 is too far away to raise the block size and that the bitcoin community will be in a worse position than it is today in the first half of 2017. Recommending BitcoinClassic, he said that the proposal “has already taken action and shipped a working solution in code that we can use today.”

According to latest estimates from Coin.dance, Bitcoin Classic has 894 nodes running the software at press time.

Bitcoin core developer, Gavin Andresen tweeted, “So.... what's the process for deciding what goes into Core hard fork and how it's deployed? Same way timeline was decided?”

Valery Vavilov, CEO BitFury, told Forbes, “For us, before we switch to another team, we need to understand if the existing team with the great experience who worked on this for many years can [upgrade the network]. For me, it would be good if Classic and Core could join forces and collaborate. Because of the Classic team, I think the Core team started to move slightly faster. The Classic team is good, but if Core can do this, why take the risk and switch?”