As much as I would like to see segwit continue to gain traction, the same pools that were mining segwit before are still mining it now, so there doesn't appear to be any increase in support and this is just variance related to pool luck.

He already told you no. It won't make 1 bitcoin in 1000 years even. No mining hardware will make you 1 bitcoin in a day unless you buy at least 500 of them.

AntPool = BTC-U supporter of bigger blocks miner control of the network
There, fixed it for you

Solo mining is virtually pointless at current levels of network diff, amounting to no more than lottery mining. The vast majority of miners would end up spending a lot of money on hardware and never once be rewarded for their mining; the whole point of proof of work and the mining system is for there to be incentive to mine, and solo mining leaves them with a virtually guaranteed loss and no meaningful incentive. Note that I run a solo mining service and maintain ALL the free software necessary that would allow them to do it themselves so it's not like I'm even against solo mining, I'm just realistic about it.

It's not from lack of incentive. Many of us have spent a lot of man hours with discussion, theories and code in mining that the non-mining world probably is not remotely aware of and quick to dismiss as "greedy miners." The idea behind p2pool was sound, but the reality was that the design is fundamentally flawed in a way that cannot be fixed, making it worse to mine on than a regular pool. P2pool is ultimately simply a merged mined blockchain on top of the bitcoin blockchain - mining on the merged chain means you're simply solo mining on a chain with slightly lower difficulty, yet still far too high a diff. After extensive discussion and investigation it is clear that these flaws cannot be fixed to make it even as attractive as regular pooled mining, let alone better. The design of the current bitcoin proof of work itself means that will always be the case. Without a massive change to the blockchain and proof of work design, pooled mining will always be possible, and the "p2pool" design will never be as good. A distributed peer to peer proof of work design that intrinsically does not lend itself to pooled mining without even changing from sha256d allowing existing hardware to continue mining is indeed a solution but unfortunately p2pool is not it and cannot be made to be it.

No you will not be able to merge mine one chain onto another. For merged mining to work, the merged coin needs to explicitly support being merge mined.

You must be confusing your terminology since POW is Proof of Work which is what current bitcoin is and what segwit and BU would still be if either fork activated.

Can't advertise this site enough:
https://99bitcoins.com/bitcoinobituaries/

Bitcoin has in fact died 125 times to date

The whole lot. Unless you import the blockchain from another pruned node that has done the whole lot once, then it has to download the whole lot to confirm its validity before pruning it as it goes. I've imported a pruned block chain that I pruned once to half a dozen new pruned nodes,  but the first time it came from a full block chain of my own (that way I need not trust anyone else's data.)

I'd love to see you ask them to stop signalling BU and signal segwit. 

And that's not true either. The most centralised it ever was (after becoming more than just a fringe between a handful of people) was when the deepbit pool had about 50% of the network hashrate which was in the GPU (and a lesser extent still CPU) days. Assuming all pools are actually discrete entities at the moment and not just one bigger entity masquerading as multiple entities, it is actually more distributed now than it was in the GPU days. It is not the hardware, nor is it the mining algorithm, it's the fact that pooled mining can (and will) occur. There is talk of ways around it, but I've yet to see a concrete way to make it truly impossible to pool proof of work.

The same people who were taking it seriously before are still taking it seriously now, which speaks volumes of their thought processes.

Just to elaborate further, antpool is dedicating 75% of its hashrate to BU, and bitclub being in that list is an error; I know doin.dance is listing them but it's wrong. They're definitely advertising segwit only.

Resource exhaustion.

Each driver thread instance remains after the device dies, and after 360 odd devices, each with its own driver thread, the system will not allow the one application to create any more threads. The solution is to not create an actual driver thread until it's clear the device is really working (in code) rather than just detected.

But bitcoin is high technology which requires high level engineering. How would the average Jo ever have come up with what bitcoin has become so far, and then where to take it from here? Why dump the high technology now and treat it like a black box that should never have high level engineering applied to keep advancing it, only to have a few dials and buttons adjusted by users?

And the number of BU nodes is back to the about the same level showing yet again the type of person running this crap (that and all the VPSs owned by the same people inflating the numbers artificially.)

This is the funny part, antpool don't even need to be running this BU crap to be signalling for it. i doubt they'd trust 100s of PH of mining operations to that crap.

It's like a religious cult at this stage. They will accept any old crap offered up now, on the premise of "it's just a bug". Imagine trusting the 20 billion dollar btc industry to this crap; crashes are the least of my worries.

That is completely wrong. Ckpool is maintained publicly. Ckdb is not maintained publicly.

You miss the point if you think changing the proof of work will fix the problem. The problem is not what the proof of work algorithm is, the problem is simply that work can be pooled. Anything can be made into an ASIC given enough financial incentive, and any type of work can be pooled. What really is needed is to make it impossible to pool work. Find a solution for that and you have progress.

...Yes? This is the group that chose BU as their protest vote.