The Bitcoin Apocalypse Is Coming in Mid-November
As a Bitcoin fan (and someone who owns a little), I think it&#x27;s a pretty good article.<p>Some more tidbits of information from my perspective:<p>&gt;The anti-2Xers argue that the NYA should not be binding because it was negotiated behind closed doors, and that a change of this magnitude needs to be more carefully considered before it is adopted.<p>No active developers were part of the NYA. Some in the NYA have said that they agreed because they believed Core was party to the NYA.<p>&gt;But there is another school of thought, which is that Bitcoin is (or should be) a currency rather than a commodity, primarily a medium of exchange rather than a store of value.  These are the folks who want you to be able to buy a cup of coffee at Starbucks with Bitcoins.<p>I don&#x27;t think anyone, including Core, is against that (higher transaction throughput). But on-chain scaling alone can&#x27;t get you very far, and it has large costs that need to be carefully considered. The (backward-compatible) Segwit capacity upgrade just happened, and it takes time for people to update their software to make the newer more-efficient transactions. (... If the consensus was that Bitcoin really was urgently hurting for transaction capacity, you&#x27;d expect people to be updating to Segwit transactions faster than they are now.) The idea that another capacity upgrade should be rushed so soon immediately after Segwit is kind of silly. The idea that it should be decided so soon behind closed doors by a few CEOs is sillier.<p>&gt;The 2X advocates have refused, citing the NYA, and secure (at least apparently) in their belief that enough people will update their code that there will be no doubt that 2X is the One True Chain.<p>Let&#x27;s be clear about the word &quot;update&quot;: it means to switch their software to a fork that none of the active community Bitcoin developers contribute to and that none plan on contributing to. Many have said that if Bitcoin &quot;fails&quot; after the fork, they have no interest in contributing to the Segwit2x fork&#x27;s software. (The big-blocker anti-segwit movement stalled work for years, politicized the Bitcoin space, and contributed to making many of the core devs be the target of harassment; imagining that unpaid volunteers are going to switch to working on a project made by the latest iteration of that is ... to call it wishful thinking seems too kind.)