Blockstream engineer Rusty Russell has publicly stated his support for SegWit via a user-activated soft fork (UASF), saying the current scaling impasse is “his fault.”

In a Medium post published Saturday, the Bitcoin Core contributor said he had not foreseen miner reactions while developing BIP-8.

“I chose the state machine to timeout activation after one year,” he wrote.

“I figured it was a useful checkpoint in case an updated proposal had a flaw, or (more likely!) someone came up with a far better idea. This way, miners could kill it without forcing everyone to upgrade. […] I hadn’t expected that this checkpoint would be used as a chokepoint to ransom the network.”

He added his full node now signals for a UASF, and he would upgrade it to support one in the near future.

“It’s my fault and I’m sorry. Let’s fix it,” he said.

Russell’s announcement is timely, coming at a juncture where Bitcoin’s price is coming off all-time post-$2,000 highs, but transaction waiting times and fees are creating serious usability issues.

The influx of new users caused by the price rise has exacerbated the problem, exchanges Poloniex and Bitstamp reported last week, while Bitcoin’s mempool is rising again.

“Don’t beat yourself up about it,” Core developer Eric Lombrozo meanwhile commented in response to Russell’s words on Twitter. “We all had good intentions.”