Bitcoin fork SegWit2x has been abandoned, and access to $300 million worth of Ethereum has been blocked due to a bug in Parity. Here are the cryptocurrency highlights of week 45:
- In a surprising move, the organizers of the next hard fork in Bitcoin’s lifespan have suddenly decided to suspend their plans to start increasing the block size of the cryptocurrency. The plan was originally scheduled to commence around November 16th. In an email, Mike Belshe, the CEO and co-founder of bitcoin wallet software provider BitGo, explained the decision to not move forward. “Unfortunately, it is clear that we have not built sufficient consensus for a clean block size upgrade at this time. Continuing on the current path could divide the community and be a setback to Bitcoin’s growth. This was never the goal of Segwit2x.”
- The price of Bitcoin plunged after the SegWit2x upgrade got called off. The crash in price of Bitcoin (down $1,300 in the last two days) has been accompanied by almost all altcoins crashing. An exception is Bitcoin offshoot ‘Bitcoin Cash’, which surged around 100%. After an initial crash after being created on August 1, Bitcoin Cash has recovered sharply and now seems to be uniting those who want Bitcoin to scale through big blocks. Joannes Vermorel, founder at Lokad, even wrote that “Bitcoin Cash is Bitcoin”.
- In the meanwhile, Bitcoin Classic announced that it would be shutting down. Bitcoin Classic is a fork from Bitcoin Core that looked to increase block size limit in an attempt to increase transaction processing capacity. While promising at first, Bitcoin Classic is now officially shutting down because of claims by developers that Bitcoin Cash (BCH) will rise to the top and be ‘Bitcoin’ in as soon as 6 months. Thursday morning, release manager Tom Zander made a public statement that Bitcoin Classic had, “fulfilled its promise,” but that “It is now up to you which chain will gain the most traction. It is now up to the next billion people to start to use Bitcoin Cash. In at most six months I’m sure we’ll just drop the ‘Cash’ and call it ‘Bitcoin.”
- A single user has managed to jeopardize lives of countless individuals by permanently locking down dozens of multi-signature digital wallets simply by accidentally deleting the code needed to access the wallets. The wallets were hosted by Parity Technologies; the company admitted that the incident occurred this Tuesday and approx. 900,000 Ether or $300 million worth of ether are blocked. User devops199 accidentally activated a function that converted the multi-signature wallets into standard wallet address while the user acquired ownership of these wallets. As a result, all multi-signature wallets became useless, and the funds in them were locked permanently. Now, it is next to impossible to access them.
- Compared to the previous week the price of Bitcoin has decreased by more than 13 percent, with the exchange rate currently at about $6,424 per BTC. The price is Bitcoin Cash is at $1,250 per BCH. The price of Ethereum increased by almost 3 percent the same period, with Ether trading at a rate of $306 per ETH. Ethereum Classic gained about 56 percent, with the price increasing to $18.85 per ETC. Zcash gained 8 percent. One ZEC is now trading at roughly $248 per coin.
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