It is very clear to me that this isn't "just another fork".
I found the best explanation in an article from Forbes:"Will This Battle For The Soul Of Bitcoin Destroy It?" Oct 23th 2017.
Briefly, they explain that the question that divides the community is how to upgrade the network to accommodate more transactions at any given time. SegWit2x plan triggered the upgrade to SegWit in August and planned to raise the block size to 2MB in November. In the meantime, Bitcoin has been a 1MB coin featuring SegWit — the coin that the developers want but the miners did not allow. So now the developers and their supporters are doing their best to prevent the upgrade to 2MB, or at least to ensure that the 1MB coin with SegWit survives and is labeled the real Bitcoin.
However, the future of bitcoin depends on four main groups: 1) core developers, 2) miners, 3) exchangers and 4) users. A number of exchanges and wallets have indicated that they expect to support both chains, at least initially. Core developers and users are likely to support the original bitcoin whereas miners would make a better profit in the new Segwit2x. However, the final result depends on the complex balance among these four groups. In any case, November fork is not "just another fork". It is crucial to bitcoin and it cannot have replay protection because the whole point is whether we are OK with SegWit or we want SegWit2X. This is a developer ideological-political decision that would mostly depend on miners and users reception.
I wonder whether it is due to most people in this forum are users that we really don't care about technical and ideological matters, and see all forks just as free money/bitcoin pumping events. Be careful and confirm that somehow SegWit2X has replay protection before celebrations..
More details in: "Will This Battle For The Soul Of Bitcoin Destroy It?"
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2311281.msg23447760#msg23447760https://forbes.com/sites/laurashin/2017/10/23/will-this-battle-for-the-soul-of-bitcoin-destroy-it/?c=0&s=trending#73a466721362"Bitcoin transactions are grouped into blocks that get processed every 10 minutes. The amount of data that can be included in any given block is limited to 1MB — an arbitrary cap instituted early on to prevent spam on the network. However, transaction volume has been growing, making blocks full, pushing up transaction fees as people compete to ensure that their transaction makes it into the next block or one soon after. While everyone agrees the number of transactions that can be processed at any given time needs to be increased, there is no consensus around how."
"The first group says, actually, if we make the houses bigger, then it’s going to be a bit harder for the many people who make them. We might end up with fewer builders overall, which would be dangerous, because then the power of constructing these houses will become more centralized into the hands of fewer players. And if that happened, not only would they have too much power, but then a government or other hostile actor could target them in order to stop us from building houses altogether.
The second group says, but to go from a minuscule-sized house to a tiny one isn’t going to make it that much more difficult for the builders. Plus, organizing better will only give us more space gradually over time, while doubling the size of the house will give us space we really need overnight.
This is the debate that’s gone back and forth for at least three years."
"The efficient organizer side includes the cypherpunks who envision a world in which the barriers to anyone running their own Bitcoin node (like running your own email server instead of using Gmail) are low, keeping the network as decentralized as possible and therefore further beyond the reach of any government or control by any entity or group of entities."
"The bigger block side includes several venture-backed startups who have brought millions of people to Bitcoin such as the two biggest wallets, Coinbase and Blockchain who have an estimated 30 million crypto users altogether. Other popular companies on this side include Xapo, which is one of the top five Bitcoin storage companies globally and whose CEO Wences Casares may be the entrepreneur most responsible for getting Silicon Valley excited about Bitcoin; Shapeshift, which CEO Erik Voorhees says sees 2-3% of the daily global Bitcoin transactions; Circle, which has backing from Goldman Sachs; Blockchain, whose investors include Lightspeed Venture Partners and Richard Branson; and the biggest investor in the space itself, Barry Silbert’s Digital Currency Group.
Their vision for Bitcoin is of a new form of money not dictated by any government or central bank but created and used by the people — lots of people, including traditional Wall Street financiers investing in Bitcoin, people in developing countries making $5 transactions, people in developed ones paying for $5 for a cup of coffee.
One of the largest Bitcoin holders, Roger Ver, who is a proponent of big blocks, says the small blockers “think it’s just an interesting science experiment, and they can have everybody running Bitcoin on their Raspberry Pi at home. For me, I want to build a currency that’s going to replace the euro, the dollar and the yen, and every other government-issued currency around the world, and in order to do that Bitcoin needs to scale massively.”"
"If cypherpunks vs. entrepreneurs represents the philosophical divide, SegWit vs. SegWit2x is the political one — and it’s intensely political. Bitcoin’s four main stakeholders are the tech-focused core developers, the profit-driven miners, the business-oriented startups and the users"
"Given that 85-90% of miners are signaling that they support SegWit2x, let’s assume that that’s how much hash power goes to that chain. Meanwhile, if 85-90% of users really do support the 1x chain as the chain split tokens indicate, to the point where they are willing to give up coins on the 2x chain to buy more 1x coins (and assuming that they’re not foiled in their attempt to do so by a replay attack), then it really does become a game of chicken. However, who blinks first is highly dependent on price.
The key to the 2x side winning is for the miners to act in concert and hold on, even if the other chain is more profitable, until the 1x chain becomes unusable and users flee to the 2x chain. How long they can do so depends on whether mining the 2x chain will simply be less profitable than mining the 1x chain or actually unprofitable. Part of the miners’ motivation to push for bigger blocks has to do with the fact that transactions on the blockchain itself pay miner fees. The more of those that are shifted to layer 2, the less they make in such fees. So, while mining the 2x chain may be less profitable or even unprofitable for some time period, they may be willing to make that tradeoff for their long-term goal. If the 2x chain prevails, 1xers who tried to boost the chance of their coin winning by selling the 2x coins in droves may end up losing money. "
"However, while the SegWit2x side could win in a number of scenarios, the opposite could happen too. The 1x chain could be more profitable not only because of the current chain split token spread, but also because users on the 1x chain may pay high fees to try to get their transactions pushed through the infrequent blocks. These factors could entice miners to mine that chain. Blocks then wouldn’t be as slow and the chain could have fewer problems, which would boost the confidence of 1xers and push the price up, which would draw more miners, and so on, in an upward spiral until the SegWit2x chain is unprofitable for so long that almost all the miners defect from it back to the 1x chain."
