WIN BITCOIN
The User Activated Soft Fork (UASF) to activate Segregated Witness in 2017 was one of the most pivotal events, and in general time periods, in the Bitcoin history.
There is a long history before the culmination of outright conflict that year, but 2017 was when everything boiled over. What started as long-standing disagreements over technical approaches to scaling Bitcoin to a larger user base culminated in a stand-off between a majority of the large corporations in the space and developers and a large group of active users and market participants.
This was how it played out. Regardless of the fact that there were users who supported the direction of a hard fork blocksize increase, the actual attempt to do so was spearheaded by massive corporations who felt that, because they were the big professional players, they decided how Bitcoin would evolve.
In response, a large grassroots web of users, developers, owners of smaller businesses in the space and even traders and market makers on large exchanges began organizing and lobbying their peers to not go along with the hard fork.
It was these large corporations holding the activation of Segregated Witness hostage and demanding an additional hardfork blocksize increase in exchange, and this network of users running a client that would cause a chainsplit while activating Segregated Witness if everyone else didn’t cave and go along with the activation.
That activation date was August 1, 2017.
It was a defining moment in Bitcoin’s history, one that seems to have been mostly forgotten now. This year, there is almost no mention or discussion or celebration of this historic event.
Has Bitcoin really grown so much that these pivotal moments in its history are just being forgotten? The lessons learned from them fading away into the past? This year, it really seems like it to me. Many people are not even aware of these events, others who learned of them second hand are already distorting and twisting the lessons taught, and rather than being cognizant of the lessons of past corporate behavior many actively encourage repeating the mistakes of the past.
Rather than remembering that Bitcoin is at its strongest when it is widely distributed, when people directly interact with the network itself peer-to-peer in large numbers, and encouraging growth in that direction, people blindly cheer on growing corporate influence and control.
In light of that, I’m posting a video I recorded six years ago summarizing the deeper motivating history, as well as the overall dynamics and rationale behind the UASF. I recommend watching it at least 1.25x speed.
Happy Independence Day for those who still remember it.
