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Comment by ftlio | Hacker News Reader

What was controversial about segwit outside of a large commercial interest (Bitmain) losing the ability to leverage a patented algorithm that effectively increased their ASIC productivity? I always thought that was what drove most of the drama and Bitcoin Cash, a place where they could continue to arbitrage that mining boost, to come about.

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Well a lot of people were bamboozled by manufactured misinformation there. There has been a lot less of it here-- presumably because there is a lot less incentive to create and propagate it-- and fewer people have been falling for what misinformation exists.

Back then it was so clearly orchestrated propaganda, but it took a lot of newcomers. I'm not looking forward to this cycle's "blocksize" debate. It seems that rolling new coins is the better vector overall for such schemes, for better or worse.

Thank you for continuing the discourse all these years and keeping people informed.

Wasn't my opinion on it, just a casual observation on the difference between the two BIPs.

The monetary incentive for Bitmain was without dispute last time. Such a thing doesn't exist this time.

Taproot will pass without any drama.

I don't think there were people who thought segwit was bad. There were simply people who thought that more was needed to allow more TXses in a block. They were generally in favor of allowing much larger blocks.

The reason segwit got involved was mostly that it was framed as "either we do segwit, or we do bigger blocks"

> I don't think there were people who thought segwit was bad.

Well there were people saying it, how much anyone feel for their false claims is unambiguous.

Rick Falkvinge, for example, put out a series of articles and videos falsely claiming that segwit was patented.

People falsely claimed that segwit removes signatures from the blockchain.

People falsely claimed that segwit would make it impossible to prove ownership of coins.

People falsely claimed that segwit would make bitcoin less secure and that users funds would be stolen.

People falsely claimed that segwit would reduce scalability by using 4MB of data for 2MB of transactions. (other people claimed that they were 10% larger, which is also untrue).

People falsely claimed that segwit would not fix the malleability attacks.

People falsely claimed that segwit would require everyone to upgrade, and that it required "all bitcoin software to be partially rewritten".

People falsely claimed that coins using segwit would be less valuable.

People falsely claimed that segwit didn't solve the quadratic computational cost of signature hashing.

People falsely claimed that segwit was not a softfork.

People claimed segwit was activated in spite of majority opposition (in fact when segwit activated >90% of nodes were running the software and 95% of hashpower).

People claimed that segwit was a "poison pill that would result in a network suicide".

People falsely claimed that segwit was a plot by Bilderberg to give some shadow "jew" coalition control over Bitcoin. (I really had no idea how much anti-semitism was still a thing online until I was getting a bunch of fucked up shit sent to me ... and I'm not even a jew, but the facts didn't stop the people hating on segwit).

I'm actually copying these brain damaged arguments out of published articles, I just don't want to give that retardation traffic. This doesn't even include the more hyperbolic nonsense that got taken offline as it was embarrassingly disproved.

By the time segwit activated bcash already existed-- so the bigger block people had thing and were basically in full on sabotage-bitcoin mode.

I guess some of those arguments could have actually convinced some people, but I believe most of those arguments were made in bad faith. Certainly, I was not aware of any technical downside to implementing segwit. Except maybe the very weak "if avoidable, its better not to do soft-forks"

Most of those arguments were made by people who don't understand what they are talking about, but that doesn't mean fuckery wasn't afoot. Segwit was falsely positioned as an alternative to increasing the block size, and after it went into effect, the pro-segwit people refused to raise the block size like the promised to, claiming some technicality. The result was that fees went astronomical, Steam stop accepting Bitcoin along with many other merchants and bitcoin went from being useful as a currency (a threat to fiat) to being a pure ponzi scheme like wall street had always smeared it as. And who was paying the anti-big block, pro-segwit devs? Oh that's right, private equity backed startups like blockstream.

>the bigger block people had thing and were basically in full on sabotage-bitcoin mode.

Failing to raise the block size and the resulting loss of real economic activity on the chain were what sabotaged BTC, exactly as the "bitcoin should be like gold" people wanted. Twisting that around and blaming the bigger block people for "sabotaging bitcoin" by warning that this would happen is beyond insane.

Segwit was a good change. But it was used by wall street to kill bitcoin and it worked.

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