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Comment by Taek | Hacker News Reader

Though it has industry support, it does not have user support, because it does not have a working, tested implementation released. With less than 3 weeks until the fork triggers, I highly doubt they are going to get substantial user adoption by the time the fork triggers.

One of the most amazing properties of Bitcoin is that it's completely user driven. When it comes to the fundamental consensus rules, no amount of hashrate or corporate agreements can force a change onto the userbase. It's a system that intentionally resists central control. Any changes need to start with userbase support, and I'm just not seeing that with Segwit2x.

If I am wrong, I will find out soon enough.

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How do you define user support?

All the definitions I heard are able to be manipulated easily:

-The/r/bitcoin consensus? Is mainly in existence because of censorship

-User wallets online? Can be easily created with AWS instances

-Bitcoin core? Who decides these bunch of people are in charge to represent all users and not a bunch of other developers?

One obvious alternative is to let Bitcoin follow economic incentives: Bitcoin miners gain Bitcoin, so they have a vested interest that their income is and stays valuable. Thus why not let the miners decide. This is also the only place where you can't influence/manipulate Bitcoin easily.

User support is really easily measured in the event of a split and really hard to measure before the split.

Quite simply, the coin price indicates support. After the split, there will be two versions of the Bitcoin network with independent prices. A non zero price indicates non-zero support, and as long as it's at least 25% of the original price, it'll probably be okay.

A high price indicates high support.

In the long term, the hashrate follows the price. Miners will mine the coin with the highest price, because they can't afford any other option. Electricity is expensive.

So you say mining of Bitcoin only follows the market value?

Isn't it at least to a large degree the other way round? That market value is following based on what is the most mined chain? If there's a split and 80% of mining power switches to one branch. Then the 20% branch loses a lot of utility for at least some time. It now has five times slower transactions until difficulty gets adjusted(or you change the proof of work of bitcoin, which itself can be precarious). And now to a minor degree the minority chain has also less safety (less hashing power).

Meanwhile why should anyone buy or send Bitcoins at the point of a split? There's a real chance that one branch will die and then you can lose the coins. The best strategy is probably to wait. So the market at least is in some way inhibited during a split.

On the other hand I'd argue miners of the minority chain have a lot of pressure to change branches. Market is not yet a good indicator only hashing power and they'll lose money if they don't continue to mine on the more profitable chain. Their safest bet is to change chains. Also they know that other miners of the minority chain think probably similarly. That's why imo in Bitcoin history every fork/split was resolved very quickly and a branch "won".

For the august 1th date user support for segwit2x does not matter at all. If the miners that agreed to run this software stick to it, they will start signaling bit4 on 21th July, when they reach 80% hashrate it will orphan non segwit blocks (kinda like bip148 but with miner support) and at the same time signal bit1 to lock in segwit which by then if that works has enough hashrate to overcome the 95% threshold to activate it. No user support at all needed for this.

Only the 2x part of segwit2x will need user adoption, but that comes 3 months after segwit has activated (next round of drama, long on popcorn)

User support means nothing. Users have to either accept the way that the system works, persuade the miners to change their ways, or switch to another coin whose systems they prefer.

Certainly, the last of those options seems to be popular recently.

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