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Comment by rampage101 | Hacker News Reader

Any thoughts about how half of the Bitcoin community does not support these changes? Currently there are 2 subreddits, r/bitcoin and r/btc where the first one is pushing the changes and censoring people, while the second group says the SegWit changes will be a disaster.

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Well, those running nodes seem to support it, and we'll see later in the month how many miners choose to signal support.

There is a significant minority of the bitcoin community who want a straight blocksize increase instead, but the extra space already provided by Segregated Witness is hard to argue against, and it's also technically orthogonal.

> but the extra space already provided by Segregated Witness is hard to argue against

There will be very little "extra space" provided by segwit. The overall capacity may be raised from 3 TPS to 4 TPS.

It's probably not half the community, but we'll know soon when voting starts.

There is a certain elegance to just increasing the block size and leaving everything else about Bitcoin the same — no segwit, no lightning, etc. And it could have been done a year ago.

Why would a straight block size increase be elegant? It preserves a bunch of protocol warts like witness malleability, quadratic hashing, lack of script versioning, etc. I think it is far more elegant to have a single protocol change that fixes all these issues in one fell swoop and also an effective block size increase.

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder I suppose.

Those wanting a unlimited block size increase are mostly less technical and don't understand the difference between expanding and scaling.

If it slows nodes down exponentially as the chain gets too big then that isn't scalable.

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