Core developer Greg Maxwell has deflated hopes of imminent SegWit activation, saying any redeployment “can’t happen” until the current one expires.
Responding to an alleged agreement led by Barry Silbert at the Consensus conference to activate SegWit by September, Maxwell explained this was due to technical reasons of “simplicity and safety.”
“So in 0.13.1+ almost all of SegWit is already active, including all the P2P components... the new network service flag, the witness-tx and block messages, compact blocks v2, etc. A redeployment of SegWit will need to redefine all these things,” he explained on Reddit.
“...It sounds like that proposal was made entirely without the aid of anyone who has even been following the discussions in detail.”
The text of the agreement has meanwhile made its way online, brief comments stating participants would “activate a 2 MB hard fork on September 21, 2017.”
It continues:
“We are also committed to the research and development of technical mechanisms to improve signaling in the Bitcoin community, as well as to put in place communication tools, in order to more closely coordinate with ecosystem participants in the design, integration and deployment of safe solutions that increase Bitcoin capacity.”
Cointelegraph reported Monday that the proposed timeframe for SegWit activation may be significantly earlier than that published in Silbert’s agreement after information from an anonymous source.