Bitcoin price reached $1,030 in most global Bitcoin exchanges such as Bitstamp and Bitfinex earlier today, recovering from the March 24 drop which occurred due to speculations on the likelihood of Bitcoin Unlimited being executed as a hard fork solution.
Last week, a severe bug was exploited by Bitcoin Unlimited developers and as a result, the software’s lead development team released a closed patch to fix the bugs in the Bitcoin Unlimited software. The majority of the community was outraged by the incompetent move of the Bitcoin Unlimited development team in releasing an undisclosed update on its software.
As a result, the support for Bitcoin Unlimited decreased significantly in terms of both hash power and node count. More importantly, the decline of Bitcoin Unlimited increased support toward Segregated Witness. Bitcoin investors including Alistair Milne emphasized that support for SegWit has never been this high prior to the second bug exploitation of Bitcoin Unlimited.
How increasing SegWit support & Bitcoin Unlimited decline affect price
Since early March, Bitcoin price has continued to fluctuate wildly due to the unclarity in Bitcoin hard fork contingency. While the vast majority of the Bitcoin industry including wallet platform operators, Bitcoin exchanges and node operators expressed their strong support for the Bitcoin Core development team and its scaling solution SegWit, miners in China such as Bitmain’s Antpool signaled Bitcoin Unlimited.
Users, businesses and miners are seeing some level of clarity in the Blockchain increase debate as the support for Bitcoin Unlimited is dwindling. Although it is still too early to speculate if the declining support for Bitcoin Unlimited will translate to SegWit support, the majority of the community currently believes that this will, in fact, be the case.
Also, Bitcoin and Blockchain startup Prasos CEO Henry Brade noted that the Bitcoin Unlimited team is seeing a conflict of interest between the industry and their group of miners. Bitcoin Unlimited doesn’t want to be listed as an altcoin or an alt asset but most exchanges have already announced that if BTU is introduced to the market, it will be listed as an alt-asset.
“BU can't do a fork without splitting into an altcoin. BU doesn't want to be an altcoin. Thus I see a high likelihood of no fork,” said Henry Brade.
If the support toward SegWit increases in the upcoming weeks and the door for two-layer scalability solutions such as Lightning and TumbleBit opens, it is highly likely that Bitcoin price will reach a stability point in the near future.