Chile’s SurBTC bids farewell to New York Agreement, SegWit2X

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Sometimes, love isn’t a good enough reason to stay.

Such was the case for Chilean cryptocurrency exchange SurBTC, which announced on Wednesday that it is no longer supporting SegWit2X that is scheduled to happen in November.

In a blog post, the Latin American exchange said that they’ve “always loved SegWit” and believe that the 2Mb increment in block size is a “good idea,” which was why they decided to sign the New York Agreement (NYA) in May. But now that SegWit (SegWit 1X) has been activated on the Bitcoin network, SurBTC said it is backing out of the agreement due to Bitcoin Core’s opposition to SegWit2X, the protocol change embedded in the BTC1 software client that stemmed from the agreement.

“Even though we would be happy to have moderately larger blocks to accommodate growing demand, we feel that Bitcoin needs (at least a majority of Bitcoin’s core developers’ support in order to do this responsibly,” the exchange stated. “We haven’t seen this support and we don’t like what we currently see on the btc1 code repository in terms of technical considerations and open source collaboration.”

SurBTC said it will allow its users “for sure” to withdraw Segwit2X if the fork happens, noting that they may eventually list the new asset to their trading platform in the future—although not labeled as “Bitcoin” or “BTC.”

Buzzer-beating announcement

SurBTC’s announcement comes on the day Bitcoin information website Bitcoin.org is scheduled to publicly call out cryptocurrency-related companies that support the November event. SurBTC did not mention Bitcoin.org’s threat in its statement, but the exchange was one of the 50 companies named by the website.

Specifically, Bitcoin.org demands that such companies will not list the SegWit2X chain as “BTC” or “Bitcoin” nor will they do anything to “deprive users of their coins.” This may include crediting BTC deposits only as SegWit2X deposits, although providing access to SegWit2X coins is “acceptable.” Lastly, the companies must also continue to provide normal service to non-SegWit2X users.

SurBTC joins another NYA signatory, payment service provider Bitwala, in withdrawing support for the consensus. Bitwala announced in August that it will no longer support the agreement because the company is putting its customers first.

By declaring that “SegWit2X has nothing to do with SegWit,” the people behind Bitcoin.org are affirming their intent to kill the SegWit2X hard fork. But in doing so, they are also freeing all the miners to publicly say the obvious—that BTC is no longer Bitcoin.

And so, the search is now on for the one true Bitcoin. There’s ethereum, which has sent the cryptocurrency space into an initial coin offering (ICO) craze. Another group of miners is also planning to create another version of Bitcoin on October 25, which they plan to Bitcoin Gold. And then there’s Bitcoin Cash, which enables low transaction fees and favored for commerce and the Internet of things as originally intended by Satoshi Nakamoto.