I have no Idea about the inner workings of the blockchain, bip this or bip that... my question is how
will this "war" effect users of Bitcoin. Will splitting of the chain make it unreliable for merchants and
customers to use bitcoin? what effect will that have on adaptation ?
If I was a new bitcoin user or a merchant thinking about accepting bitcoin , I would be scared
out of my wits from some of the discussions going on..
I don't think there is a real concern. This is actually bitcoin working as designed. Changes like this require consensus. Once consensus is reached, all the economic incentives are there for everyone to start following the same rules (for transaction verification). For example, once >50% of miners adopt these stricter rules around p2sh transaction verification, other miners not supporting it risk mining blocks that are invalid to the majority of miners and their 50 BTC block reward being unmarketable. Miners could even decide that they'll enforce the rules of both BIP16 and BIP17 just to be on the safe side (which just means that they won't include any transaction that would be considered invalid under either the BIP16 or BIP17 transaction format). It would be better (less confusing) if people could just settle on one solution to p2sh, but even if they don't and miners validate both styles of p2sh transactions, everything will work just fine.