Maybe they're betting on a significant and silent number of people to agree with their project? Perhaps they want to chuck it out there and see who takes it up.

I've read that it'll start with significantly lower difficulty so perhaps there are a lot of old ASICs looking for some work.

I think the 2mb hard fork is going to introduce a brand new morass of arguing and FUD. Whatever agreement exists now is likely to be splintered by that.

The more pertinent question is - what will happen when it's 2mb fork time?

That's the only reason many of the Chinese miners agreed to run Segwit.

A hard fork is a much, much bigger deal. I dunno how it's going to go down. It's rather irritating that the drama has only been postponed.

It's definitely the most interesting thing to emerge in recent times. It's kind of odd how few people are talking about it. It's going to be fascinating to see how it plays out.

Yes but only if you control your private keys. Coinbase have already said they're not bothering.

Bitcoin Cash wallet options look to be very limited at present. I don't know if any of the most common wallets will bother to incorporate it in time so you'd have to export keys. I'd go for a paper wallet and transfer keys from there into whatever Bitcoin Cash wallets are available. It looks like their client and something called Electrum Cash right now.

That's a fork. Not a split. It's self declared new coin.

Don't go scaring the younglings.

To put their theories and code to the test? As it's upgrade time in general they may as well throw that out as well. They've been going on long enough about it.

No it will not. BIP 91 which is what's being signalled now and might well be locked in by the end of the day ensures that.

There will be a hard fork but that creates a new coin, not a chain split.

The scaling issue was raised the moment the 32mb limit was reduced in 2010.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1347.msg23049#msg23049

Even if it everyone loved each other and were putting flowers in their hair, Segwit would still have been a vast deal. It's the first upgrade of capacity.

Maybe I am, but China is basically a Bitcoin desert outside mining. The actual usage is taking place in areas where the economic players have nothing to do with mining and Coinbase at least is having nothing to do with this fork. I assume most others will follow.

They've consistently proven their code isn't good enough. No one other than themselves wants to follow them.

The big block advocates, or rather this strain of them as I don't really have a problem with larger blocks, seem to operate in something of an echo chamber of their own construction.

I think they rather radically underestimate the utter contempt most others have for them or there's some weird blindness to it. Check the average Roger Ver tweet. There's a list of abuse about four metres long beneath it.

I think it is relevant. Even though they're a lot quieter than they once were, and wisely so, they must still be driving a fair amount of BTC volume. Somewhere like Alphabay must've had several hundred thousand users and that means Bitcoin users.

Dunno. The implied 2mb fork is going to introduce more squealing and uncertainty than ever that might shit all over any current price rises. I will guess a return to nudging $3000 again and then it's all over the place for the rest of the year.

As long as the money rolls in not enough people care enough about centralisation. It'll take a major scare for it to be firmly back on the radar.

Before anything else let's see how much of their own mining power they devote to it. The money will remain on the main chain. If they attack that I really don't think people will be inclined to switch to a chain under the control of a handful of pricks who destroyed the original one.

https://www.europol.europa.eu/newsroom/news/massive-blow-to-criminal-dark-web-activities-after-globally-coordinated-operation

So Alphabay is a well known goner. As above the Dutch police took control of Hansa for a while before nabbing as many details as possible and closing it down.

Is this going to majorly disrupt dark markets or will it be an endless game of cat and mouse? Is there a decentralised one yet?

You're very strange. Do you happen to work for Visa by any chance? Or are you the embittered owner of a corner shop who doesn't like counting out their cash? What emotional investment do you have in denying people financial privacy?

Market cap, baby. It means nothing. Bitcoin's price is set by a few thousand coins on exchanges. If sellers go on strike it could be there tomorrow.

Gold is similar. Do you really think people could extract $9 trillion in real money from the gold market? Of course not.

Sweden and Denmark have pretty much done it already. Others will follow a lot sooner than we realise. The state of a country's development is key. It was chaos when they attempted to move towards it in India.

There won't be a chain split. Segwit will be locked in before then and 148 will be irrelevant. Why didn't they say they'd do this if there was ongoing uncertainty? There won't be by then.