What the scheduled Bitcoin hard fork means for Blockchain Wallet Users

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At Blockchain, our priority is always our users. Our view on network upgrades and forks is two-fold. First, we will prioritize user safety throughout any network upgrade or instability above all else. Second, we believe our users should maximally benefit from forks wherever feasible.

Not sure what a hard fork or soft fork is? Click here to learn more. Want to understand how this might impact your Blockchain wallet? Read on.

On approximately November 18th, when block 494,784 is mined, a hard fork enabling the bitcoin network to carry 2MB blocks is expected to occur. This follows the soft fork upgrade earlier this year that added Segregated Witness (SW) signatures to the network. Many refer to the combination of these upgrades as the New York Agreement (NYA) or SW2X , which was supported by a majority of the consumer facing industry, including Blockchain, as well as miners.

There is a significant possibility that the planned hard fork will result in two bitcoin block chains. In this case, we will follow the chain with the most accumulated difficulty and refer to that chain as Bitcoin. If the minority chain has significant value we will make that value available for customers to hold or exchange for a period of time, as we did with Bitcoin Cash. If the minority chain is the one with 1MB blocks, we plan to call it BC1. If the minority chain has 2MB blocks, we plan to call it BC2.

During this period, it may be necessary to temporarily suspend outgoing bitcoin transactions for a period of time during network instability. However, even in this scenario, your funds will remain safe and you’ll be able to monitor them from within the wallet. You’ll also be able to use all Ethereum related functionality. If you have transactions to make around late November, we suggest you buy some Ether in our wallet today.

As always, our wallets are non-custodial and you, our users, hold the private keys, meaning you always have full, exclusive access to your funds with your recovery phrase and can import them into another wallet of your choosing.

That’s why our motto is, Be Your Own Bank™.

While no immediate action is required, we encourage you to write down your recovery phrase if you haven’t already.

Originally published at https://blockchain-blog.ghost.io on October 12, 2017.

What the scheduled Bitcoin hard fork means for Blockchain Wallet Users was originally published in @blockchain on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.