F2Pool, the world’s second largest mining pool, released an announcement this Tuesday signaling SegWit(Segregated Witness )for bitcoin. F2Pool’s stance on SegWit has been ambiguous over the past several weeks. On March 22, Wang Chun, the owner of F2Pool, wrote across social media platform, “Rest in peace Bitcoin Unlimited,” making clear his rejection of bitcoin unlimited. On March 27, however, Chun shared a rather abstract statement with the bitcoin community claiming that: “Bitcoin can’t fork and won’t fork.” The community was confused about the intent of his statement as SegWit is also a fork of the bitcoin network. It seems that Chun and F2Pool were not willing to pick a specific side. On April 1, F2Pool mined SegWit blocks for both bitcoin and litecoin, but stopped signaling for SegWit the very next day. Based on what they have been working on, it seems that F2Pool wants to test SegWit on litecoin first before moving to bitcoin. On April 14, Chun revealed the result of an internal survey conducted among its miner. He disclosed that 56 percent of miners within the F2Pool mining pool network were in favor of SegWit. And now Chun and the F2Pool have finally clarified their stance on SegWit with the following announcement . The announcement reads: Bitcoin has come a very long way ever since its inception in 2009. The price of per bitcoin has reached over＄1200 and for the first time ever, the price of one bitcoin has surpassed the price of one ounce of gold. Now banks worldwide are joining the race to study bitcoin and its backbone technology blockchain, preparing themselves for an ongoing revolution. In such contexts, the bitcoin community has been debating scaling solutions for years. Sadly, the debate is developing into an all-out war of words as different parties attack one another on the Internet. Most people don’t realize that the debate is about what is best for bitcoin instead of choosing one specific scaling solution, SegWit, BU or other scaling solutions. At F2Pool, we are in favor of SegWit plus large blocksize. SegWit can help solve technical problems and large blocksize is beneficial to the bitcoin ecosystem in the long run. But the hard fact is that we are not able to reach this goal under the current situation. The decision to support SegWit may be abrupt, but F2Pool claims that it is for the best interests of its miners and the community. We see the strong demand of scaling, and many foreign users are supporting SegWit. Therefore, we cannot afford to do nothing. It’s time we move on and activate SegWit first. As for large blocksize, let’s leave it for future discussions. We are firmly convinced that as Bitcoin keeps evolving, it will continue to surprise the world with its enormous potentials. April 18, 2017 Here are some comments about the announcement at 8btc: “Does this mean miners are also with SW?” “Hooray! No need to worry about money.” “It’s all about hash power. They want to suppress BTCC.”
F2Pool, one of the three largest bitcoin mining pools, has begun signalling for the adoption of Segregated Witness (SegWit) following a poll of its users which found that 56% favoured the proposal. F2Pool confirmed the need for an end to the ongoing scaling debate in a statement, and said it believes increased block sizes are the way forward for the cryptocurrency. SegWit can help to solve the technical problems posed by larger block sizes.