It became a news story because certain miners (allegely) run by ASIC companies were blocking segwit[1], and it turns out it's because fixing the transaction mal

It became a news story because certain miners (allegely) run by ASIC companies were blocking segwit[1], and it turns out it's because fixing the transaction malleability[2] bug in Bitcoin breaks ASICBOOST[3]. ASICBOOST adds nothing of value to the network, it is not an "optimization" in the sense that it makes it cheaper to bundle transactions, which is beneficial to both the miner and the network. in its most naive use it creates garbage blocks to siphon rewards. So basically, the reason some people are mad is, a thing that fixes a longtime problem in bitcoin that has been preventing taking advantage of some of the more advanced features of bitcoin, is being blocked because it breaks some crooks' unfair advantage. caveat: IANABE (I am not a bitcoin expert) 1. dramatic change to bitcoin network, doesn't matter what it is for this argument except it includes also bundles some fixes to the network so it will work. 2. bug in bitcoin transaction specification, transactions transmitted to the network are hashed for identification, but not all data in the transaction is hashed and some people found ways to forge fake duplicate transactions with the same hash but differing on other critical (unhashed portion) information, to steal money and make certain advanced features of bitcoin worthless. 3. custom hardware "mines" bitcoins by doing transactions, ASICs have been made that do this faster, therefore they get more rewards, and raise barrier of entry to mining. "fair" enhancements do more verification faster, you get the reward. ASICBOOST just exploits the algorithm to get more reward without making the network better. And it doesn't work when a (2) is fixed.