The Barry Silbert segwit2x agreement with >80% miner support.

[Zerebokep]

Let them hard fork, but as long the original bitcoin will still be named Bitcoin and not something like Bitcoin Classic they'll fail. So the best idea would be to start spreading a new name for the hardforked bitcoin right now, what about BitMafia or BitCorrupt?

[25hashcoin]

With bitcoin adding segwit, I wonder what's going to happen to a lot of altcoins as a result.  This is going to be a very interesting year.

Not going to be pretty for alts. Let's take a look at how many use cases are left for some of the top altcoins after Segwit enhancements for bitcoin.

Increased blocksize/Lightning network = death of litecoin, dogecoin

Smart contracts/ethereum platform on bitcoin blockchain with counterparty and rootstock = death of ethereum and ethereum classic

Tumblebit/mimblewimble/CT/sidechains = death of monero, dash, zcash


Long live the Bitcoin.

[European Central Bank]

With bitcoin adding segwit, I wonder what's going to happen to a lot of altcoins as a result.  This is going to be a very interesting year.

Not going to be pretty for alts. Let's take a look at how many use cases are left for some of the top altcoins after Segwit enhancements for bitcoin.

no one cares about features. all they wanna do is pump and pump again. there'll be a big hit and then they'll start to pump once the whales have loaded up again. the more attention bitcoin gets, the more desperate noobs are born who'll go straight to alts.

[ebliever]

With bitcoin adding segwit, I wonder what's going to happen to a lot of altcoins as a result.  This is going to be a very interesting year.

It would be high time for BTC to become competitive with the alts. It's up 100% in a timeframe in which alts generally are up 1000%. I sense a lot of bitterness in the bitcoin maximalists who missed out.

If bitcoin can navigate the minefield now before it (and I feel less confident than I did last night when I was finally starting to get optimistic), it could have SW+LN in August, along with Rootstock smart contracts. But it is lagging badly behind Ethereum in terms of the partnerships and businesses already working based on the Ethereum platform, and frankly I don't think Bitcoin will regain the lead there.

Even with plenty of TX capacity Bitcoin still has 10 minute confirmation times, making it a real drag transferring coins. Lately I've taken to selling into Dogecoin to move small amounts, as much for the speed improvement as for the TX fee. And Zcash got a huge boost today with the JPMorgan news. It, Dash, Bytecoin and Monero all have a lead in native privacy features that Bitcoin lacks.

The point being, the Bitcoin maximalists are kidding themselves when they imagine everyone returning solely to Bitcoin. It's a multipolar cryptoverse now, and we may never see Bitcoin at 50% of market again. Even if we do I expect it to be temporary.

[ComputerGenie]

...The point being, the Bitcoin maximalists are kidding themselves when they imagine everyone returning solely to Bitcoin. It's a multipolar cryptoverse now, and we may never see Bitcoin at 50% of market again. Even if we do I expect it to be temporary.

I can think of 1/2 a dozen coins that paid miners almost 2x what bitcoin would/did (and even 3x or more given the right trading scenarios) in the last week or two.

[Pab]

Dont worry about best alts,thay have strong integrated community and best devs who colaborate each other instead of create tensions and wars.That kind of news will appear to dump btc,any hard fork will cause escape from btc to best alts

[European Central Bank]

so where is this actual statement? wasn't it due this morning new york time? have there been any mentions of it through the day? maybe they're thinking again.

[Iranus]

With bitcoin adding segwit, I wonder what's going to happen to a lot of altcoins as a result.  This is going to be a very interesting year.

Not going to be pretty for alts. Let's take a look at how many use cases are left for some of the top altcoins after Segwit enhancements for bitcoin.

no one cares about features. all they wanna do is pump and pump again. there'll be a big hit and then they'll start to pump once the whales have loaded up again. the more attention bitcoin gets, the more desperate noobs are born who'll go straight to alts.

To be fair, smart contracts are quite a decent use case.  The idea that Ether would overtake Bitcoin and actually become bigger/more relevant is basically a joke the way I look at it, but it certainly has its own use.

[JayJuanGee]

so where is this actual statement? wasn't it due this morning new york time? have there been any mentions of it through the day? maybe they're thinking again.

Rumors might be greater than the news....

[Calangaman]

The current situation is very confusing. We are at a turning point here.
The BTC community is mostly made of articulate people who have been thru all sort of cycles. They think time is working for them as BTC has never been that high. It doesn't.
The market cap of crypto almost quadrupled in 6 months and new investors go either for the quick buck or for better technical features.
It is painful to admit that newbies have the firepower to boost any coin to a point where BTC miners may want to consider mining other stuff.
I'm personally fed up with seeing scam coins going to the moon. This market is going crazy and it's up to the big boys to put the house in order!

[-ck]

I think it's ok. First they activate SegWit. Then everyone will see that hardfork is redundant. But if some fools try to hard fork after SW they will end up with alt on their hands.

Except that's not what they're proposing. They want to activate segwit WITH the hardfork, not separately, nor before the 2MB change.

[The One]

The current situation is very confusing. We are at a turning point here.
The BTC community is mostly made of articulate people who have been thru all sort of cycles. They think time is working for them as BTC has never been that high. It doesn't.
The market cap of crypto almost quadrupled in 6 months and new investors go either for the quick buck or for better technical features.
It is painful to admit that newbies have the firepower to boost any coin to a point where BTC miners may want to consider mining other stuff.
I'm personally fed up with seeing scam coins going to the moon. This market is going crazy and it's up to the big boys to put the house in order!

Why? Missing out on making easy money?? A coin may be a scam to you but not to others. Hence why they are going to the moon.

There are those who thinks Bitcoin is a scam? What do you say to those?

Big boys - core developers?? Why? it is none of their business.

[ComputerGenie]

....
I'm personally fed up with seeing scam coins going to the moon....

Why? Missing out on making easy money?? A coin may be a scam to you but not to others. Hence why they are going to the moon.

There are those who thinks Bitcoin is a scam? What do you say to those?

Big boys - core developers?? Why? it is none of their business.

I'd almost be willing to bet $5 that he's one of those that are of the mindset that most, if not all, coins that aren't BTC are "scam coins" and/or "shitcoins", just because they aren't BTC.  

[The One]

....
I'm personally fed up with seeing scam coins going to the moon....

Why? Missing out on making easy money?? A coin may be a scam to you but not to others. Hence why they are going to the moon.

There are those who thinks Bitcoin is a scam? What do you say to those?

Big boys - core developers?? Why? it is none of their business.

I'd almost be willing to bet $5 that he's one of those that are of the mindset that most, if not all, coins that aren't BTC are "scam coins" and/or "shitcoins", just because they aren't BTC.  

Whilst there are many shitcoins, not all shitcoins started as a scamcoins. Some developers of shitcoins had the best intention but it just didn't appealed and failed. There are many scamcoins that took the BTC and ran off. A few altcoins do come up with interesting features but whether the real world will accept them is another thing. The value may be too high but that is hardly the developers fault if others are pumping the coins to "da moon", typically typed by kiddies.

[d5000]

They want to activate segwit WITH the hardfork, not separately, nor before the 2MB change.

I agree that the proposal is not "what we expected". But it's pretty close to proposals where Segwit comes first and 2MB, some months after. The item that mostly worries me from the proposal is that it doesn't address quadratic validation time.

Couldn't it be possible to change the proposal very slightly, allowing only 1 MB for legacy transactions (P2PKH/P2PSH), and to make the 2 MB change exclusively for P2WPKH/P2WPSH transactions? It that was possible and accepted by the miners, the most worrying problem would have been solved.

[dinofelis]

Couldn't it be possible to change the proposal very slightly, allowing only 1 MB for legacy transactions (P2PKH/P2PSH), and to make the 2 MB change exclusively for P2WPKH/P2WPSH transactions? It that was possible and accepted by the miners, the most worrying problem would have been solved.

I think that the idea is exactly the opposite: segwit as a toy for those kids that want to play with it, but "normal bitcoin" needs more room.  So essentially, this is, I think, mainly seen as just a 2MB upgrade, with the concession that those who want to play with segwit, get their toy, but that normal old style bitcoin transactions can continue.  Once they see that they can get 2 MB, whenever the 2 MB are full, they can do it again to go to 4 MB.  In fact, like they used to in the past: augmenting the real block chain room.  And yes, if some people want to go to segwit style transactions and addresses, this is admitted that they can do so if they want to.
This is maybe also why the short time frame is not a problem.  After all, changing the hard-coded constant to 2 MB is not a lot of work.  And whatever happens to the twits that want to use segwit is their affair.  If that code doesn't run very well doesn't matter much ; the normal bitcoin part will run OK.

[ComputerGenie]

Most don't know what segwit IS...

And almost as if he sat down and did his best to prove The One right:

...segwit as a toy for those kids that want to play with it, but "normal bitcoin" needs more room.  So essentially, this is, I think, mainly seen as just a 2MB upgrade, with the concession that those who want to play with segwit, get their toy, but that normal old style bitcoin transactions can continue.....  And whatever happens to the twits that want to use segwit is their affair.  If that code doesn't run very well doesn't matter much ; the normal bitcoin part will run OK.

[stdset]

The item that mostly worries me from the proposal is that it doesn't address quadratic validation time.

Solution is pretty trivial:

To prevent worsening block verification time because of the O(N^2) hashing
problem, the simple restriction that transactions cannot be larger than 1Mb
has been kept. Therefore the worse-case of block verification time has only
doubled.

[dinofelis]

The item that mostly worries me from the proposal is that it doesn't address quadratic validation time.

Solution is pretty trivial:

To prevent worsening block verification time because of the O(N^2) hashing
problem, the simple restriction that transactions cannot be larger than 1Mb
has been kept. Therefore the worse-case of block verification time has only
doubled.

Yes, and in fact, transactions of 1 MB are ridiculous, because they could easily be replaced by a tree structure of smaller transactions, changing the N^2 into N log N.  

All the arguments against "bigger blocks" are bogus.  Non-mining nodes have nothing to do with decentralization (of power), and the N^2 time has to do with the size of individual transactions, which have been erroneously left to be much much too big from the initial design.  There is simply no point in having such big single transactions.

[CyberKuro]

~snip~
In short, what this actually means is a large proportion of the big mining pools have agreed to ignore pretty much all scaling signalling and adopt their own to further their desires. They plan to do a hard fork within 4 months that both activates segwit and creates a base block size increase of 2MB concurrently. In addition, they are NOT going to be using the existing segwit bits, signalling instead their own bit to activate segwit which is incompatible with the segwit activation from core. They are also planning activation at >80% hashrate.

In essence this means the pools are creating a fork of the current bitcoin code which is planned to be incompatible with any current version should their hard fork go ahead. Which means that every single current code node user, be they core, BU, classic, XT, whatever, is currently going to be on an incompatible fork of bitcoin after their planned deployment in September. So they are asking the entire community to ignore all existing bitcoin implementations and adopt their software node implementation before that time, or risk being on a very hashrate poor fork, even though there is no published code to support this September fork yet.

It seems like big mining pools dominate and control bitcoin as they've been meeting in secret, all transactions processed by them and they get profits in every transaction in form of higher fees due to bitcoin price which always increase.
If they want to fullfil their desires, what kind of desire? If blocksize increased and transaction become faster, than it would be great for adopters. We will see how is it going to be, incompatible - a very hashrate poor fork or whatever it will be.