Just a few minor corrections, and some comments, if you'll permit me: > It doesn't explicitly allow larger blocks. It does, however, upgrade Bitcoin to allow s

Just a few minor corrections, and some comments, if you'll permit me: > It doesn't explicitly allow larger blocks. It does, however, upgrade Bitcoin to allow side chains. SegWit itself as implemented is explicitly a blocksize increase. More TX can fit on-chain. It upgrades Bitcoin so that a host of other, interesting upgrades become possible, but as part of SegWit there is a blocksize increase to about 2MB. > I believe the root of this argument is that Bitcoin has served us well for many years, so why try to build another, potentially weaker system on top of it? The interesting tangent here is that the exchanges themselves dwarf on-chain transactions in terms of economic volume. They absolutely dwarf it, and we don't see anyone demanding we put every exchange TX into the blockchain. :-) Instead we see people talking about how they should be able to put individual cups of coffee on-chain. It's odd, to say the least. > But, for whatever reason, the dialog shifted. This is a crucial point. The narrative change in large part is driven by totally opaque reasons that even an informed person like yourself can't remember or fathom. Why did it change? This is where speculation about the economic disincentive for it comes in, and with the evidence that covert ASICBoost is a direct option in all currently-deployed hardware from Bitmain, it becomes more clear why their constantly-shifting technical reasons might be.. constantly shifting. > ASICBOOST, the way this mining operation has supposedly been using it, is not compatible with SegWit. Nobody says they have more than circumstantial evidence for it being used. The main issue is that it could be used, literally tomorrow, and nobody would know it. And it would be something that would improve their efficiency even though none of their customers have it enabled. This means their profit even in relation to their own customers would be a crushing advantage, and nobody would know, so they can just say e.g. what they did in their recent press release. "No, we're not using it."