New York Agreement Discussions Coalesce Around SegWit2x
Leading companies, miners and developers gather momentum around the New York Agreement, proposing to couple SegWit activation with an eventual block-size increase.
Around May 18, 2017, conversations that had been building in both public and private forums solidified into concerted discussion of the New York Agreement (NYA) — an industry-led proposal that sought to reconcile scaling disagreements by pairing Segregated Witness (SegWit) activation with a later '2x' hard fork to double Bitcoin’s block size.
The NYA was framed as a pragmatic compromise: SegWit would resolve transaction malleability and enable some scaling benefits immediately, while the 2x increase would address throughput concerns at a later, coordinated date. Representatives from prominent exchanges, wallet providers, mining pools and infrastructure companies publicly signaled support for the concept, which they argued would stabilize markets and reduce the chance of contentious chain splits.
The proposal, however, exposed deeper tensions: many in the developer community argued that consensus changes affecting block size required broader technical deliberation and more rigorous testing, while some miners and businesses prioritized immediate capacity relief. The NYA’s emergence highlighted the governance challenges of a decentralized protocol with powerful centralized service providers.The discussions before formal announcement were pivotal because they set the stage for the high-profile announcement that would follow at Consensus and catalyzed months of debate over who should steer Bitcoin’s technical future and by what processes.