A community of bitcoin businesses, exchanges, wallets, miners, and mining pools, going by the name ‘Bitcoin Roundtable’, has released a letter saying that as contentious hard-fork carries additional risks and potentially may result in two incompatible blockchain versions, it would be extremely detrimental to the bitcoin ecosystem at present.

The letter comes within two days of the first release of Bitcoin Classic version 0.11.2. It has been signed off by Bitfinex, BitFury, BitmainWarranty (AntPool), BTCC, BIT-X Exchange, BTCT/BW, F2Pool, Genesis Mining. GHash.IO & CEX.IO, LIGHTNINGASIC & BitExchange, Litecoin creator Charlie Lee, Spondoolie-Tech, Smartwallet and Zoomhash.

The names in the group are quite shocking as Bitcoin Classic – “hard forking bitcoin to a 2 MB blocksize limit” – says that it has received support from BitFury, Bitmain (Antpool) and Genesis Mining.

The letter makes five key points:

1. We see the need for a modest block size increase in order to move the Bitcoin project forward, but we would like to do it with minimal risk, taking the safest and most balanced route possible. SegWit is almost ready and we support its deployment as a step in scaling.
2. We think any contentious hard-fork contains additional risks and potentially may result in two incompatible blockchain versions, if improperly implemented. To avoid potential losses for all bitcoin users, we need to minimize the risks. It is our firm belief that a contentious hard-fork right now would be extremely detrimental to the bitcoin ecosystem.
3. In the next 3 weeks, we need the Bitcoin Core developers to work with us and clarify the roadmap with respect to a future hard-fork which includes an increase of the block size. Currently we are in discussions to determine the next best steps. We are as a matter of principle against unduly rushed or controversial hard-forks irrespective of the team proposing and we will not run such code on production systems nor mine any block from that hard-fork. We urge everyone to act rationally and hold off on making any decision to run a contentious hard-fork (Classic/XT or any other).
4. We must ensure that future changes to code relating to consensus rules are done in a safe and balanced way. We also believe that hard-forks should only be activated if they have widespread consensus and long enough deployment timelines. The deployment of hard-forks without widespread consensus is dangerous and has the potential to cause trust and monetary losses.
5. We strongly encourage all bitcoin contributors to come together and resolve their differences to collaborate on the scaling roadmap. Divisions in the bitcoin community can only be mended if the developers and contributors can take the first step and cooperate with each other.

Dr. Washington Sanchez, Co-founder of OB1 and core-developer for OpenBazaar, responded to the letter noting, “The pool administrators who have signed this statement represent ~90% of the hashing power on the network, but this does not necessarily represent the miners themselves.”