Indeed. As I understand it, the core Bitcoin developers only fully figured out how the covert version of ASICBOOST was implemented in practice and realised tha

Indeed. As I understand it, the core Bitcoin developers only fully figured out how the covert version of ASICBOOST was implemented in practice and realised that it was incompatible with not just Segwit but a whole class of Bitcoin extensions a few days ago: https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2017-April/013996.html https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2017... Think about that. It looks like miners had been blocking a scalability extension for over a year not because of any of their stated complaints against it, but because they'd secretly rolled out hardware using a secret acceleration technique that was incompatible with extending Bitcoin. That's scary. (There's some explanation of which other kinds of improvements it'd block in the follow-up here: https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2017-April/014000.html https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2017... ) Furthermore, the miners in question were apparently plotting a Bitcoin protocol change without public discussion whose actual purpose appeared to be permanently blocking such future enhancements: https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2017-April/014003.html https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2017...