The new SegWit2x has been pitched as a new and improved version of the proposed original hard fork. The reason for its existence is supposedly to help with the scalability issues of Bitcoin. That genesis block was mined at around 6PM UTC, Dec. 28, and at that same time, the team behind the project announced its official launch. In this article I'm going to dig a bit deeper into the details of SegWit2x and why I'd advise using extreme caution here if you are thinking about potentially 'investing' in this new token.

The SegWit2x movement originally started in May 2017, as a direct result of the New York Agreement (NYA). The idea behind the agreement, originally signed by more than 50 leading Bitcoin companies, was to achieve a compromise on how to scale Bitcoin for a larger audience.

One of the sides, the “small blockers,” wanted to implement the second-layer solution called SegWit, which did indeed take place on Aug. 24, 2017. That was the first part of the compromise. The other part of the deal was designed to appease the “big blockers” by increasing Bitcoin’s block size limit to 2 megabytes. However, this was never followed through with, directly violating the agreement.

The fork was slated to happen on Nov. 16. However, as the developers unveiled the actual code for the hard fork, a vastly negative reaction from the Bitcoin community immediately followed. The lack of replay protection, along with general concerns about the safety of a possible hard fork, gave rise to an entire movement against SegWit2x, aptly called #no2x.

After several weeks of controversy, the fork was cancelled on Nov. 8, about a week before its scheduled arrival. The team tasked with creating the code for SegWit2x shelved the plan due to a lack of consensus.

So that is the story. The original plan failed as I believe it needed to. As a result Bitcoin Cash forked off and it accomplished some of the things this proposal set out to do in a different way. The biggest miners are located in China and they didn't want to see their enterprise destroyed by all this infighting so they decided to take the next step and make the first Bitcoin fork alternative, Bitcoin Cash.

Well, the story of Segwit2x continues as cancellation, wasn't permanant and the fork was revived in late December by a different group of developers. So lets look at this new fork proposal shall we?

Firstly, a website has been set up, stating the mission, the roadmap and the team behind the new fork that was set to take place on Bitcoin block 501451.

Here's where things get a bit shady...

Reports began surfacing over the past several days that focused on several inconsistencies on the project’s home page.

First and foremost, the team behind the new fork has nothing to do with the people behind the original New York Agreement and the SegWit2x that was cancelled in November. They have even admitted it themselves in a chat with the Finance Magnates news site.

This in itself isn't too bad. I mean competent developers should feel free to add to the cryptocurrency offerings if they'd like bringing added value to the cryptospace in general. However, there is very little information available online about the team members listed on the official website. This is worrying for such a supposedly large endeavour.

For example, the project’s supposed founder, Jaap Terlouw, only has a half-empty LinkedIn profile. There he claims that he is the ‘main developer’ of the new SegWit2x, with no other sources to corroborate his status as a ‘developer.’

Moreover, the project’s GitHub account is just 9 days old as of press time, which makes it even younger than some of the earlier announcements of the upcoming fork in the press.

These past two facts illustrate that their is quite a lot of trouble establishing a credible backstory for the people behind the project. This is a huge red flag but maybe not an end all, lets keep going shall we?

Beyond their sketchy references, the code stored in their GitHub account indicates that the team members were planning to assign themselves 6 mln premined coins, a whopping 28% of the total supply of 21 mln:

This constitutes an incredible degree of control over the project that some would argue a scrupulous team should not have. Likewise, it represents an enormous (and instant) potential profit to the team members. This could encourage a quick pump-and-dump.

This is a bigger red flag in my opinion than the lack of references and ability to demonstrate experience with creating big name cryptocurrencies. A premine and a potential pump and dump. A centralization of something that is meant to be decentralized (I mean otherwise I should just stick with VISA right?).

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