It is always interesting to keep an eye on the public opinion regarding the SegWit and BU debate. Although miners clearly favor Bitcoin Unlimited – who wouldn’t want to make more money? – the community strongly feels otherwise. The community-managed support poll hosted on Coin.Dance clearly shows support for SegWit sits much higher compared to Emergent Consensus.
Community Support Heavily Favors SegWit
For several months now, the focus of the entire bitcoin scaling debate has been on the miners. While these people help secure the bitcoin network and facilitate transaction processing, they only represent a portion of the entire bitcoin community. Everyone else is not too keen on Bitcoin Unlimited, for obvious reasons. Instead, there is an outspoken desire for Segregated Witness, which is often overlooked by die-hard BU fans.
In fact, looking at the list of companies who prefer Emergent Consensus, the support is pretty lackluster. Very few companies openly supported Bitcoin Unlimited in the first place, and those who do are mostly controlled by Jihan Wu and Roger Ver. Strip out that support entirely, and Emergent Consensus support dwindles down to virtually nothing. This does not mean all of those smaller companies and service providers are less important to the bitcoin ecosystem, but they are not in the same league as wallet providers and payment processors either.
Bitcoin Unlimited supporters have made it clear all companies should support BU. At this stage, that is nothing more than wishful thinking, though, as none of the major companies will ever do so, based on current information. Moreover, some /r/btc members feel miners are the ones who should define the future of bitcoin and be part of this new paradigm. Sentiments like these will only widen the gap between Core and Unlimited supporters moving forward.
Moreover, it goes to show the Bitcoin Unlimited debacle has gone on for far too long already. Ever since this struggle got mainstream media attention, the bitcoin price started losing value. Granted, the price has started to recover slowly ever since, yet it goes to show forking bitcoin should not even be considered. Then again, people’s ideologies often get in the way of using common sense these days.
More and more people are wondering whether or not there should even be a choice to begin with. Segwit and changing the ad-hoc block size limit are not mutually exclusive by any means, although a lot of people still think they are. It is certainly possible to have the best of both worlds, yet so many people are utterly convinced they need to make a choice sooner or later.
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