New York Agreement (NYA)
A May 2017 deal among Bitcoin companies and miners to activate SegWit and then hard fork to 2 MB blocks. Signed by parties representing about 83 percent of mining power but no Bitcoin Core developers. The plan was called SegWit2x.
The New York Agreement was a deal struck on May 23, 2017, at the Consensus conference in New York, meant to end the block size war. It was organized by Digital Currency Group, the venture firm run by Barry Silbert, and signed by 58 companies across 22 countries. The signatories claimed to represent about 83 percent of Bitcoin's mining power, 20.5 million wallets, and billions of dollars in monthly volume.
The plan, known as SegWit2x, had two parts. First, activate SegWit, the upgrade the small-block camp wanted. Second, hard fork to a 2 MB block size about three months later, the increase the big-block camp wanted. Each side was supposed to get half of what it had been fighting over.
The trouble was who signed and who did not. The agreement was a pact among exchanges, wallet companies, and mining pools. The developers who maintain Bitcoin Core were not part of it, and neither were the users running full nodes. That was the small-block camp's entire objection. A group of businesses meeting in a hotel cannot set Bitcoin's rules, because they do not run the nodes that enforce them. Bitcoin governance explains why that veto sits with node operators rather than with miners or companies.
The first half worked. SegWit activated in August 2017, pushed along by the separate pressure of BIP-148. The second half did not. Signatories began withdrawing over the following months, and on November 8, 2017 the organizers called off the 2 MB hard fork for lack of consensus. What the agreement actually demonstrated was the opposite of its intent: an alliance of miners and companies, however large, could not force a contentious change onto a network whose users declined to follow.
Key takeaways
- Signed at the Consensus 2017 conference in New York on May 23, 2017, organized by Digital Currency Group; signatories were 58 companies representing roughly 83 percent of hash power
- The deal bundled SegWit activation with a later 2 MB hard fork - the '2x' half - to give both sides of the block size war part of what they wanted
- It was negotiated without the Core developers who maintain Bitcoin and the users who run nodes, which is why critics treated it as an attempt to change Bitcoin by corporate agreement rather than by consensus