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Comment by Rmilb | Hacker News Reader

Speculation is that this is primarily due to Bitmain's announcement yesterday to hard fork if the UASF soft fork gets any momentum. Jimmy Song has a good analysis on this.

https://medium.com/@jimmysong/examining-bitmains-press-relea...

This forking of Bitcoin is a required trial that the chain must go through to prove how resilient it is to this type of attack. It is unknown which chain will win in the event of a fork, maybe Ethereum will win, probably not PotCoin.

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Is that a good thing or a bad thing? Sorry for the ignorance, I don't know enough about crypto to follow your statement.

It depends on your view point. For Bitcoin to succeed it must be able to withstand what some view as an "attack" on it. If bitcoin is vulnerable to this attack it doesn't deserve to last, it needs to be fixed, tested and tried again. All of these cryptocurrencies are still experiments and advocates equate changing the code consensus code like patching a 787 in mid flight because of how much value is dependent on the network working.

The miners fork winning will be a bad thing if you value the decentralized aspect of the currency and want bitcoin to succeed. Not everyone does.

It's UASF, not USAF :-)

Which is short for "user-activated soft fork", meaning a group of Bitcoin users (as opposed to miners) declare that they're following a new, backwards-compatible protocol regardless of what miners think (if miners agreed, it would just be a "soft fork").

Thanks, edited.

Can someone do an ELI5 of this debate? I'm a bit confused.

This may help you out to get started, then read the previous article I linked.

https://medium.com/@nopara73/explain-uasf-like-im-five-ae879...

It is not a simple topic with two sides. It has very technical details as well as economic incentives for both sides which leads to a lot of game theory.

The Chinese? miners won't upgrade the protocol b/c they are making money, and Bitcoin is running into some scaling issues with the 1 megabyte limit, so the users are revolting with a 'user-activated soft fork'. Something along those lines.

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