On this day in 2017, after years of an exhausting and vicious Blocksize debate and a failure to reach any real support for a specific consensus rule change, the UASF (user activated soft fork) community movement successfully implemented one of the most important upgrades to the Bitcoin protocol that directed its future development.  This was done in direct opposition to a large conglomerate group consisting of all of the largest network mining pools, and a significant group of the largest businesses in the ecosystem.

The SegWit2x Business & Mining Group met in private with the explicit intent, despite a clear lack of agreement among the community and developers, to force a consensus breaking alteration to the Bitcoin protocol. Boasting the support of 95% of the hash power, they threatened attacks and the inevitable death of anyone who continued the original chain without downloading their altered software. Per their dominant hash rate, they essentially held hostage a broadly supported and backwards compatible improvement (SegWit), to force the community to also implement a contentious and non-compatible change at the same time (2X). This included threats that there would be only one chain, with only the S2X rules, and the other would be attacked, and the developers would be “fired” for not going along.

Unfortunately for them, business market share and hash power does not control the consensus rules. This is determined by the network of full nodes and the users behind them, that declare exactly what rules, the ONLY rules, that they will accept as true bitcoins. “An Impenetrable Fortress of Validation.” -@stopanddecrypt

Instead of downloading the SegWit2X client, an “intolerant minority” of the Bitcoin community created their own client, in which they signalled a specific date when they would activate SegWit with or without miner support. Miners could either accept Segwit or not, but no other change would be installed on their nodes (I was a proud operator of a UASF node). Essentially, the user community challenged the SegWit2X business+mining group’s claim that they had unilateral decision making power over the network and protocol, because of their hash power dominance. It became a game of chicken, the miners and top businesses, versus the users of the network.  As it became clear the UASF community would stay the course to whatever end, figuratively putting a brick on the gas pedal and breaking off the steering wheel, the conviction of the S2X opposition began to falter. Signatories began to quietly back out, and miners stopped making public statements, while support for the UASF continued to grow unabated. It was slowly becoming more clear that without the network of validating nodes, “altering the rules” was going to look a lot more like “evicting themselves from the network and mining an altcoin.” The unshakable conviction & viral growth of the UASF movement turned out to be impossible to ignore.  With the tide against them, just 2 weeks before the final date, the entire S2X project was abandoned.

With a small group of S2X supporters deciding to still push the change, the conviction & concerns of the UASF was vindicated. The endlessly touted “simple” and “minor” alteration to the rules in the S2X client turned out to have a protocol breaking bug and they were never able to produce even a single block.

Shortly after the UASF activation, Bitmain, Roger Ver & Co (major players in the S2X push) forked their own coin, Bitcoin Cash (Bcash), removing segwit and implementing 8MB blocks. Even though the debate continues in some corners of social media, this day marked the official end of the Blocksize Wars.

• Run a node
• This day deserves fireworks!