The narrative (whether correct or incorrect) is that Bitmain tried to block an extension because it would disable a feature in their hardware that was saving them tens to hundreds of millions of dollars per year on electricity.

That has nothing to do with patents, it's (supposedly) an advantage they had over the competition, of course they are going to defend that advantage.

Patents for mining hardware though are unenforceable overall. The problem is that lots of private mining farms exist, and nothing is stopping one from developing a chip that is in violation of many patents, but then never releasing the hardware publicly. There would be no way to tell that the patent is being violated, especially because mining is more or less anonymous in the first place.

Stop spreading this conspiracy theory stuff (which is very popular on /r/Bitcoin)

Bitmain's own pools—AntPool and BTC.com—were voting for (not against) Segwit through nVersion flags in July 2017

Although Bitmain have had criticism about segwit, they are overall «publicly on record as historically supporting it» source: https://blog.bitmain.com/en/regarding-recent-allegations-sme...

They signed this pro-segwit letter: https://medium.com/@bitcoinroundtable/bitcoin-roundtable-con...

Yeah... Im not sure how you can twist the available information into attempting to say bitmain is PRO segwit.

Anyone in the space knows they are not. But please try to confuse newcomers to the space by continuing this nonsense

No, you’re spreading opinionated propaganda, and a political witchhunt. And I don’t think this is appropriate for HN.

/r/bitcoin is heavily censored and is an echo chamber. It is no way representative of the bitcoin community.

Go to any in person Meetup and you know the majority of old bitcoin era and experts are not on /r/bitcoin’s side, and wanted the block size raised a year ago. I’d suggest diversifying your news sources because /r/Bitcoin is more biased than Breitbart.

I'm not sure how you can say I'm twisting information when I cited 3 verifiable facts to support my statement. (You cited 0.)

«Anyone in the space»

You mean anyone on /r/Bitcoin, a heavily censored subreddit controlled effectively by one person (theymos and his minions) who is openly anti-Bitmain.

AsicBoost can be potentially used by anyone since it is now a defensive patent. Bitmain cares about this patent because they need to disclose all other patents they have if they want to use AsicBoost: "There Is a Bitcoin Patent War Going On, but This Initiative Could End It" [1]

[1] https://bitcoinmagazine.com/articles/there-bitcoin-patent-wa...

That was only announced last month. I suspect the only reason they promised to use it for defensive purposes is because its utility is significantly reduced due to successful roll-out of segwit. Had segwit not have passed, I doubt they would leave hundreds of thousands of dollars on the table by not licensing it.

Segwit did not break covert asicboost. The math proved that wrong, and that one could make very small, inexpensive changes to have it continue working with segwit.

This was admitted by Greg Maxwell in the dev mailing lists, when they proposed an asicboost blocker only change, that they rescinded because they realized that it and segwit never actually stopped covert asicboost.

It was also confirmed by experts like chjj (CTO of purse.io, and Bitcoin developer) that segwit never blocked covert asicboost.