Wiki / Events / Hong Kong Roundtable

Hong Kong Roundtable

From the Bitcoin Takeover Wiki · ✓ 4 sources · 0 podcast anchors · built 2026-11-13

The February 2016 meeting where miners and some Core contributors agreed SegWit first, then a roughly 2 MB hard fork that never shipped.

◆ Takeover vieweditorial · opinion, labelled

The wiki's angle: the most argued-over text of the war. Fork Wars shows Roger Ver and Jonathan Bier agreeing the letter was published and the hard fork never came on schedule, while disagreeing on what it promised.[4]

Contents

  1. The statement
  2. Timeline and commitments
  3. Who signed
  4. Legacy
  5. References

The statement

The statement says that on 21 February 2016, in Hong Kong's Cyberport, representatives of the Bitcoin industry and members of the development community agreed on a series of points[1]. SegWit would continue as a soft fork, and the Bitcoin Core contributors present would have a hard-fork implementation available as a recommendation within three months of SegWit's release[1]. That hard fork was expected to raise non-witness data to around 2 MB, with total size no more than 4 MB, and would only be adopted with broad support[1].

Timeline and commitments

The letter projected SegWit for April 2016, hard-fork code by July 2016 and, with strong community support, activation around July 2017[1]. Signers committed to run only Bitcoin Core-compatible consensus systems for the foreseeable future[1].

Who signed

Signers included Bitcoin Core contributors Cory Fields, Johnson Lau, Luke Dashjr, Matt Corallo and Peter Todd, Bitmain's Jihan Wu and Micree Zhan, Blockstream's Adam Back, BTCC's Bobby Lee and Samson Mow, F2Pool's Wang Chun, and Jack Liao of LightningASIC[1]. Jack Liao later became the public face of Bitcoin Gold[2].

Legacy

The SegWit2x project later cited the roundtable as the first agreement on 2 MB blocks[3].

References

  1. primaryBitcoin Roundtable, “Bitcoin Roundtable Consensus”, Medium, 20 Feb 2016 (Wayback Machine copy)
  2. btkBitcoin Gold: One GPU, One Vote (BTCTKVR: Forks!) [archived]
  3. primarysegwit2x.github.io, “Bitcoin Upgrade at Block 494,784” [archived]
  4. btkFork Wars: the block size war timeline (Bitcoin Takeover) [archived]

Related

New York Agreement
The May 2017 industry deal to activate SegWit at 80% and hard fork to 2 MB within six months, which became Seg
SegWit2x
The planned 2 MB hard fork that was meant to follow SegWit under the New York Agreement, suspended a week befo
Bitcoin Classic
The early-2016 client that proposed a one-time 2 MB hard fork (BIP-109) after Bitcoin XT stalled.
Jihan Wu
Co-founder of Bitmain, a signer of the 2016 Hong Kong Roundtable statement whose company backed the 2017 New Y
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