Henrik Andersson
Aug 24, 2017 · 4 min read

I’m not sure there’s a “why” that’s “true”. That’s not what I wanted to say, sounds weird to me too, but let me explain further.

why: well there are, don’t know what to call these, but factions or interest groups, parties with different motivations or ideas inside the bitcoin industry. Among many, this divide seems to be “core” (the guys who have been in charge of developing of the reference client), miners (people who mine the block, or rather people who control mining pools) and maybe relevant to this discussion could be “big blockers”, people who have been proponents of bigger blocks.

These are not hard lines, there could be people in the “core camp” who would favor bigger block in what ever time frame and some miners might be in the “core camp”. Big blockers could have interests that are aligned with miners and so it goes

Anyways there was a standoff, “core camp” were trying to get SegWit activated, it’s a thing that fixes some issues, should enable further upgrades down the line and is said to offer some scaling to the block chain.

For one reason or another, the miners weren’t playing ball, some people seem to think it were the miners who were not activating segwit because they wanted to leverage their power to not do so, to bargain for what ever it was that they wanted. In addition to that situation in particular, there have been attempts to leverage alternative solutions or software that would be either replace Bitcoin Core or at least be seen as a viable alternative to it.

Now this is where it gets tricky (mostly because I haven’t been following the intricate social aspects or power struggles inside the community). Segwit was seen mostly as a positive thing, not many people oppose it, at least not terribly vocally, but it still wasn’t being activated. I’m not going to get into all the theories of why this was the case, but it still seemed like segwit became a piece on a chess board.

Some people feel like it was used as a bargaining tool. Some people wanted bigger blocks, core wanted segwit activated. Maybe someone felt that if they activated segwit, they wouldn’t get the bigger blocks.

There seemed to be no end to all this drama, but then there was what was called a New York agreement, that seemed to bridge the cap. Everybody would get something. Segwit people would get segwit and big blockers would get bigger blocks and miners would actually “do their part” and activate the segwit.

Now this is what makes “why” hard to say and “true” subjective. Some people think the New York agreement was a major no no. It seemed to some, that this in fact was not a conversation and a resolution to an issue, it was a power grab, “creating a corporate coin” is one of the thing people have been calling it.

Why would they fork, well that’s what they agreed they would do. Why would they agree to do so? Well it depends on who you listen to.

One could say they will fork to get control of the reference client, they would in fact be in control or more in control of bitcoin. There would be no more Core as a reference client, it would instead be btc1 that’s going to be the reference client. So hard forking could be seen as a goal that has not that much to do with bigger blocks or segwit, instead it would be about control.

You could also say they are going to fork because that’s what they agreed to do. They had pure intentions, everybody got something and that’s a good thing. No deadlock, bitcoin gets better, less drama, less friction, development continues. But seeing how the agreement was: first you roll out SegWit and then we will hard fork to bigger blocks. If they don’t hard fork to bigger blocks, now that would mean someone is going to be very sour and feel betrayed.

There was a reason why they didn’t activate segwit before and none of those reasons had changed before the New York agreement, so it’s pretty certain that if bigger blocks are not coming to bitcoin, someone made a deal, pulled their part and are not going to get what was promised. I suspect if that’s the case, the next <insert city here> agreement is going to be very interesting thing to see because there are going to be parties involved that have bad experiences doing these deals.

Now what’s true? I assume it depends who you ask and choose to believe. Why would they fork, same thing, depends on who you ask and who you choose to believe. Maybe there’s no one reason to fork?

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    Henrik Andersson

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    My stack is smaller than yours and I don’t know how to use it.