Bitcoin – Potential Network Disruption on July 31st
Well, that&#x27;s a remarkably uninformative announcement.  Here&#x27;s an attempt at a neutral tl;dr from a Bitcoin amateur.<p>Bitcoin is currently suffering from significant scaling problems, which lead to high transaction fees.  Numerous proposals to fix the scaling issue have been proposed, the two main camps being &quot;increase the block size&quot; and &quot;muddle through by discarding less useful data&quot; (aka Segregated Witness&#x2F;SegWit).  However, any changes require consensus from the miners who create Bitcoins and process transactions, and because it&#x27;s not in their best incentive to do anything to reduce those transaction fees, no change has received majority consensus.<p>In an attempt to break this deadlock, there is a &quot;Bitcoin Improvement Proposal #148&quot; (BIP148) that proposes a User-Activated Soft Fork (UASF) taking effect on August 1, 2017. Basically, everybody who agrees to this proposal wants SegWit to happen and (here&#x27;s the key part) commits to discarding all confirmations that do not flag support for SegWit from this date onward.  If successful, this will fork Bitcoin, because whether a transaction succeeded or not is going to depend on which side of the network you believe.<p>However, BIP148&#x27;s odds of success look low, as many of the largest miners out there led by Bitmain have stated that they will trigger a User-Activated Hard Fork (UAHF) if needed to stop it.  Specifically, if UASF appears successful, instead of complying with SegWit, they&#x27;ll start mining BTC with large blocks instead: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.bitmain.com&#x2F;en&#x2F;uahf-contingency-plan-uasf-bip148&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.bitmain.com&#x2F;en&#x2F;uahf-contingency-plan-uasf-bip14...</a><p>Anyway, it all boils down to significant uncertainty, and unless you&#x27;ve got a dog in the race you&#x27;ll probably want to refraining from making BTC transactions around the deadline or purchasing new BTC until the dust settles down.<p>And an important disclaimer: this is an <i>extremely</i> contentious issue in the Bitcoin community and it&#x27;s really difficult to find info that&#x27;s not polarized one way or the other.  Most notably, Reddit&#x27;s &#x2F;r&#x2F;bitcoin is rabidly pro-
BIP148 and &#x2F;r&#x2F;btc is equally rabidly against it.  Here&#x27;s one reasonably neutral primer: 
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bitcoinmagazine.com&#x2F;articles&#x2F;bitcoin-beginners-guide-surviving-bip-148-uasf&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;bitcoinmagazine.com&#x2F;articles&#x2F;bitcoin-beginners-guide...</a>