A Call for Consensus

Over the past few months there has been significant attention within the bitcoin ecosystem and beyond on what is commonly referred to as the “block size issue” — the size and scale of bitcoin blocks. There is a pressing need for an inclusive roadmap that takes into account the needs of businesses and all stakeholders.

As a community of bitcoin businesses, exchanges, wallets, miners, and mining pools, we have come together to chart an effective path to resolve this challenge and agreed on five positions we hope will guide the larger community as we move forward together.

The following are five key points that we have all agreed on.

1. We see the need for a modest block size increase in order to move the Bitcoin project forward, but we would like to do it with minimal risk, taking the safest and most balanced route possible. SegWit is almost ready and we support its deployment as a step in scaling.
2. We think any contentious hard-fork contains additional risks and potentially may result in two incompatible blockchain versions, if improperly implemented. To avoid potential losses for all bitcoin users, we need to minimize the risks. It is our firm belief that a contentious hard-fork right now would be extremely detrimental to the bitcoin ecosystem.
3. In the next 3 weeks, we need the Bitcoin Core developers to work with us and clarify the roadmap with respect to a future hard-fork which includes an increase of the block size. Currently we are in discussions to determine the next best steps. We are as a matter of principle against unduly rushed or controversial hard-forks irrespective of the team proposing and we will not run such code on production systems nor mine any block from that hard-fork. We urge everyone to act rationally and hold off on making any decision to run a contentious hard-fork (Classic/XT or any other).
4. We must ensure that future changes to code relating to consensus rules are done in a safe and balanced way. We also believe that hard-forks should only be activated if they have widespread consensus and long enough deployment timelines. The deployment of hard-forks without widespread consensus is dangerous and has the potential to cause trust and monetary losses.
5. We strongly encourage all bitcoin contributors to come together and resolve their differences to collaborate on the scaling roadmap. Divisions in the bitcoin community can only be mended if the developers and contributors can take the first step and cooperate with each other.

Our shared goal is the success of bitcoin. Bitcoin is strong and transformational. By working together, we will ensure that its future is bright.

Together, we are:

Phil Potter
Chief Strategy Officer
Bitfinex

Valery Vavilov
CEO
BitFury

Alex Petrov
CIO
BitFury

James Hilliard
Pool/Farm Admin
BitmainWarranty

Yoshi Goto
CEO
BitmainWarranty

Alex Shultz
CEO
BIT-X Exchange

Bobby Lee
CEO
BTCC

Samson Mow
COO
BTCC

Robin Yao
CTO
BTCT & BW

Ronny Boesing
CEO
CCEDK ApS

Obi Nwosu
Managing Director
Coinfloor

Mark Lamb
Founder
Coinfloor

Wang Chun
Admin
F2Pool

Marco Streng
CEO
Genesis Mining

Marco Krohn
CFO
Genesis Mining

Oleksandr Lutskevych
CEO
GHash.IO & CEX.IO

Lawrence Nahum
CEO
GreenAddress

Eric Larchevêque
CEO
Ledger

Jack Liao
CEO
LIGHTNINGASIC & BitExchange

Charlie Lee
Creator
Litecoin

Guy Corem
CEO
Spondoolies-Tech

Davide Barbieri
CTO
TheRockTrading

Michael Cao
CEO
Zoomhash

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