Great article Jimmy Song!

I’d like to add a couple of points to this story:

  1. I believe the role of the UASF, though important in the story, has been generally exaggerated. This certainly doesn’t seem to be the case if you follow Twitter or Reddit, or factor-in the superfluous ‘node count’. The fact is that the UASF had virtually zero miner support, and would have resulted in a splinter group forking themselves off the main chain.
  2. Bitmain’s published a response plan if a UASF attracted a small portion of the hashing power (enough to cause some disruption to the majority). This blog post was a deeper incentive for the majority (i.e. >90%) of miners and businesses to support segwit2x and activate segwit via BIP91.
  3. As an individual involved with the segwit2x working group, UASF was almost a source of mild amusement. None of us viewed that UASF had any chance of succeeding. Our primary concern was whether segwit2x could be deployed prior to risking any disruption caused by a UASF, or Bitmain’s response.
  4. What actually catalysed the segwit2x effort was Bitcoin’s ridiculous fee levels (i.e. $3/tx, which we are now re-approaching), and to obviously break the logjam. When developers, miners, and businesses from both sides of the argument came together, segwit2x managed to achieve in a matter of weeks something that Bitcoin Core failed to achieve for a year.

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    Dr Washington Sanchez

    Written by

    Co-founder of OB1; core-developer for OpenBazaar