Warning for those who are not following this debate closely: This is an incredibly polarizing discussion. Approach all comments and articles posted about this s

Warning for those who are not following this debate closely: This is an incredibly polarizing discussion. Approach all comments and articles posted about this subject carefully. Though I'd like to try and provide a summary for people who don't know what's going on. Bitcoin desperately needs to scale to handle higher transaction demand. It can take multiple hours for transactions to be confirmed, and due to the demand, fees are high ($2-3 per transaction for fast confirmation.) A technical approach (SegWit) was proposed and implemented by the Bitcoin developers in order to improve transaction capacity a couple years ago. This also brings along a number of innovations which can help implement what is termed 'Layer 2' solutions to happen inside Bitcoin, instead of using an altcoin like Litecoin or Ethereum. Think of this enabling a Visa-like entity to provide instant settlement services denominated in BTC, and secured by the Bitcoin blockchain. However, this upgrade is very contentious with the miners who are entrusted with securing the blockchain against attackers. Bitcoin mining now is a professional enterprise where major players need to be located in places with cheap ASIC production and cheap electricity to have any hope of making a profit. In some cases, they see these new layer 2 solutions as reducing their transaction fees, which are becoming a large percentage of their profits. Instead, they have been proposing just a larger base block size limit, which will solve the transaction backlog and send the fees to the miners, but then not make progress moving forward with what users and developers want, which is increased innovation. In addition, the larger block size is seen as increasing centralization of mining since only larger providers will be able to deal with the extra data rates (since there is an advantage to having quick transfers of newly created blocks when mining.) Since Bitcoin is decentralized, anyone can run any software. There are mechanisms in place for miners to 'vote' with their hashpower/mining rate to agree on software changes, then after enough support, the mechanism activates. This is the easiest way to make sure global upgrades happen smoothly and in a coordinated fashion. However, users are becoming desperate and are looking for other ways to make these innovations happen without needing support from the miners. Unfortunately the Internet and echo chambers have destroyed the hope of meaningful discussion about this topic. Please, HN commenters, do not bring in Reddit-level comments here... Provide sources and a balanced view, and please be respectful.