On December 16th, a group of anonymous developers started announcing and promoting intentions to revive the SegWit2X bifurcation project. The supposed event is to occur with the block number 501451 in the Bitcoin network. This block should be reached on December 28th.
This alleged bifurcation rises a number of suspicions, especially because these developers want to relaunch a failed network, which was forgotten. This announcement is not promoted by any known promoter from the Bitcoin ecosystem and the majority of the announcements in the media were paid.
SegWit2X was a proposition for scalability of the Bitcoin network promoted by a group of miners and CEOs of certain companies related to bitcoin. The project was canceled recently by its promoters after it was refused by the majority of developers and the Bitcoin community.
Despite being canceled, on November 17th this year, a group of unknown developers called BitPico tried to launch the bifurcation without any success, without even creating one block in the network. They also failed to obtain consensus for execution, which prevented it from launching on the technical level.
Now, another group is trying to revive the failed proposition. The announcement was published by Bitcointalk on December 16th. The team of developers is led by three persons completely unknown in the Bitcoin community. Their Linkedin profiles are either incomplete or do not exist at all.
Another reason for suspicion is the fact they invested a lot of money in paid promotion in the media.
The Bitcoin network is based on an open code, which means anyone can create a bifurcation in the network. It is important to be cautious with these bifurcations that offer free cryptoassets in exchange for holding back funds in one of their applications. There were cases of bitcoin thefts executed by malicious wallets, which offered claims of Bitcoin Gold. We have also seen some accusations about Bitcoin Diamond, another bifurcation in the Bitcoin network announced for December.
The new attempt to reanimate a failed project rises alert. All the interested bitcoiners should be careful with their funds and make a thorough investigation before using any programme published by this groups of developers unknown in the Bitcoin community.