That's incorrect - in general the miners are opposed to SegWit, but they accepted a compromise of agreeing to SegWit if they could increase the block size to 2 MB (from 1 MB currently). SegWit will be activated within 24 hours, but Bitcoin Core (the main developers of current Bitcoin code) have already said they are not going to support an increase to 2 MB blocks. They also claim they never agreed to it in the first place.

As a result, it's very likely to see another hard fork to 2 MB in November, so there will be 3 chains with a shared transaction history, and most like all will claim to be the real Bitcoin -- personally I don't think debating which one is the "real" one is worthwhile, just use the one you want, but eventually it's likely that one chain will get the majority of hashing power and have a much higher price per token than all the others.

The Bitcoin Core developers were never part of the agreement to hard-fork and increase the block size - they've said it was a terrible idea all along at least on the time scale proposed. I don't think they even knew about it until it was publicly announced. Also, SegWit increases the block size to 2-ishMB by itself (it's complicated, because older nodes need to think blocks are still under 1MB, which is done by stripping out parts of SegWit transactions when sending to them). This means that in practice the hard fork gives a block size of 4-8MB.

The "compromise" framing of "we gave you SegWit, now you have to give us a hard fork" is pretty terrible too, because the two aren't symmetrical - SegWit makes hard forking less urgent, but hard forking to increase the block size makes the SegWit improvements more important because they're designed to make larger blocks work better. Even Bitcoin Cash copied one of the key SegWit improvements, the transaction hashing change, in very slightly modified form for this reason.

I don't think 'symmetrical' means what you think it means. Just because A makes B 'less urgent' or 'more efficient' doesn't mean we have to choose between A or B. Why not both? Bitcoin Core's dev did not give a good technical reason for not adopting 2MB beyond crowding out smaller miners blah blah blah. I mean, come on. Have they seen the last 1000 blocks list these days?

There is a good explanation on reddit of the history of this. [0] The Core developers did agree to a block size increase though in what is commonly referred to as the Hong Kong Agreement. They didn't follow though on that agreement and made up some truly weaselly excuses for why.

More recently a large group of players in the space came together and agreed to what has come to be called the New York Agreement (NYA) This said that they would support Segwit and a 2MB hard fork for bigger blocks. Core and Blockstream who largely controls Core have ignored the NYA and worked against it. They are pretending like segwit has support w/o the 2MB block increase when it doesn't and they are going around doing some truly cringe worthy stuff to tray and scuttle the 2MB part of it.

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/6uw5kf/why_does_core_r...

> The Core developers did agree to a block size increase though in what is commonly referred to as the Hong Kong Agreement.

No, a couple of developers did. I think every core developer not in the room went "wtf, no".

At least 5 by my count and the CEO of your own company which employs still more. If what you say is true then the HK agreement wasn't made in good faith.

Could you elaborate on this November fork? I've asked for input here - https://www.reddit.com/r/CryptoCurrencies/comments/6uyz9k/wi...

Miners are in favor of profit; the price of Cash went up 2.5X over the past three days, so until the mining effort does the same, mining Cash is especially lucrative.

I'll caveat my statements by acknowledging I'm an outsider to all of this. That said, it was my understanding that BTC's decisions regarding segwit were driven by the proprietary interests of Blockstream. Is this correct?

Blockstream employees are involved in bitcoin development but so are other employees of other companies. Just a bunch of FUD if you ask me.

https://blockstream.com/2017/07/31/segwit-myths-debunked.htm...

https://twitter.com/morcosa/status/831618208289398785

https://twitter.com/morcosa/status/875695603455586305

Not sure what you mean by "BTC's decisions" -- it's a decentralized network that has A LOT of different stakehodlers -- some more important than others, some louder than others.

All humans are driven by self-interest, as far as I understand Blockstream employees are humans.

Edit: After re-reading my response, I wasn't trying to be a jerk to you, poking fun at Blockstream.

No offense taken! To clarify on what I mean by "BTC's decisions," the tale I've heard is that a small group of people control a lot of the messaging around Bitcoin, e.g. the sub-reddit and a site and a Twitter account. These people also had an economic interest in Blockstream. So they used the fork to promote a solution that benefits Blockstream.

Yep, that's pretty much spot on. R/Bitcoin is extremely censored (and the mod logs are not public). R/BTC is another discussion forum that seems to be more open (people from R/Bitcoin will say otherwise). You'd think they'd spend more time talking about all the amazing things blockchain technologies are going to facilitate, but they mostly just spend their time hating on the other group. Sad, but what do you expect, both groups are comprised of "humans on the internet"!!

All r/btc does is talk about bitcoin cash and brigade r/bitcoin

that doesn't agree at all with what i've seen of this situation unfolding.

i think:

bch was created by people who want to use adjustable block size caps to scale transaction volume, and this favours established miners and consolidates their influence.

segwit was created by people who want to try a second layer for transactions (specifically the lightning network), and some miners are opposed to this direction because they would not collect fees on layer-2 transactions.

Instead, the creators of the 2nd layer solutions will collect fees.

Not strictly the creators, but the operators. Miners could operate Lightning Network nodes for example.

Is that the case? Is this what's happening with Litecoin?