Roger Ver claims that BU is now production-ready, and a hard fork is coming soon?

It's been a while since anyone has tweeted about Bitcoin Unlimited (BU). However, Roger Ver, one of BU's main supporters, made a statement yesterday that seems to have angered people again. Roger Ver said that BU is production-ready and now generates more than 40% of the blocks. Although this data is indeed true, no one in their right mind would think that BU is ready to be implemented. Ver's statement also caused some strong dissatisfaction on social media.

According to data provided by Coindance, BU currently has a clear advantage, with more blocks signaling support for BU than any other solution, including Segwit. These facts are indisputable, and many miners can make more money from BU mining because opposing SegWit can keep transaction fees high. In addition, it is understandable that some people simply prefer BU to Core.

BU is now production-ready. BU blocks currently account for 40% of all blocks produced, more than any other Bitcoin version. —Roger Ver (@rogerkver) April 22, 2017

However, Roger Ver's tweet is hard to understand. Although it is clear that he thinks BU has many advantages, it is a bit of an overstatement to say that BU is "production ready". So far, multiple bugs have been found in the BU code. One of the bugs caused hundreds of BU nodes to go offline. It is clear that BU still needs more peer review and proper testing. Once again, this is a decision made by the developers and the community.

BU is still far from production

One thing Ver keeps ignoring is that BU will never achieve economic consensus at its current rate. While it is true that miners prefer BU over Segwit, 8Mb blocks, and BIP100, this is not unchangeable. The fact that Bitcoin service providers, exchanges, and other businesses don’t want BU is also not going to change in the short term unless BU comes up with a bold plan to win their favor, which has not happened yet.

Furthermore, 40% of the generated network blocks is still a minority. No one can say that BU is production-ready until it gets at least 51% of the blocks. Even then, the BU source code needs to be bug-free, which seems unlikely. There are still many puzzle pieces that need to fall into place before BU can be taken seriously by the vast majority of the community. While this may sound harsh, it is an undeniable fact for now.

That being said, there is nothing wrong with having a voice on a topic. Unfortunately, the idea that BU is production-ready is an idyllic thought that is not based on any hard facts. BU is a solution that is gaining support from miners, and that is the reality facing the community right now. In the end, we will find that all of this scaling debate is just a delay in Bitcoin scaling. It is very likely that in the end, neither BU nor Segwit will be activated. Ultimately, this will hurt Bitcoin more than anything else.