Charlie Lee Predicts Coinbase Reaction to SegWit2x

Given that there is a particularly big event approaching Bitcoin in November, one would expect the largest Bitcoin exchange to lay out how they will handle it. However, in the face of the possible SegWit2X hard-fork, Coinbase has been quite silent.

As a result, Charlie Lee who used to be the head of Engineering and Coinbase, has released his prediction as to how they will handle the fork. This has also lead to a petition that has been signed by a number of Coinbase users.

Lee made the announcement in a Reddit post on Monday as a result of being asked numerous times. Indeed, having worked at the exchange gave many users an important insight into how it could play out. He made it clear that the fork won't be as straightforward as previous ones. The SegWit2X fork is no doubt the most contentious. He said:

...they can’t just choose one fork and ignore the other fork. Choosing to support only one fork (whichever that is) would cause a lot of confusion for users and open them up to lawsuits. So Coinbase is forced to support both forks at the time of the hardfork and needs to let the market decide which is the real Bitcoin.

Although Coinbase has not released any announcements around their proposal, they were signatories to the New York Agreement earlier this year in May. The New York agreement was scaling proposal that would see the implementation of Segregated Witness and the eventual increase of the block size to 2mb in November.

It is probably worth noting that Charlie Lee, who founded Litecoin after leaving Coinbase, has come out against the block size increase. He has placed himself in the "NO2X" camp that has a number of Bitcoin core developers in the same camp.

Angry Coinbase Users

There is indeed a large percentage of the coinbase user base that is no doubt displeased with the lack of formal communications from the exchange. The petition was launched on Change.org in order to force Coinbase to outlay their plans for the event. More specifically, the users were asking Coinbase to do right by their users and let them know how they will handle the fork and the resulting chains.

There is a hope that the recent large funding round at Coinbase ($100m) will lead to a more efficient service to their users. Indeed, Coinbase recently announced that they would be providing phone support to their users.

Featured Image via Coinbase