Segwit2X is Dead Part II

Hello fellow hodler. Everything is new when you learn about Bitcoin.

Essentially, early this year the Bitcoin community had a dilemma. Do we increase the 1mb blocksize, do we activate segwit, or do we do both? An agreement was made early Summer at Consensus 2017 where many Bitcoin companies came together and said "Let's do Both" and made an agreement to do so. As context: Generally, it's believed many core developers did not attend nor were invited to the meeting responsible for the agreement. It's also true that for the general public, the price tag for this event was pretty high.

Well what happened? Three groups emerged.

The "Let's increase the blocksize" crowd created Bitcoin Cash(Bcash, BCH) on August 1st and did not activate segwit.

The group that wanted to activate segwit, Bitcoin Core(legacy chain, BTC) did so on August 1st but with no blocksize increase.

Now the "Let's do both" group is up. Since the agreement, "2x" has been coined to represent the future chain of this group's agreement. 2x stands for 2 times the 1mb blocksize of the core chain which also means their chain would INCLUDE segwit. Their hard fork which would create this chain is scheduled to occur sometime in November.

Have I lost you yet?

Simple question, but long story... as usual. Trying to be short:

The larger the blocks, the more expensive it is to run a full node, the backbone of bitcoin AND decentralization. Suppose blocks are so large you need corporate level investments to run a full node. Yes, if companies across the world ran those blocks it would still be decentralized, but the "degree of decentralization" would be massively reduced. It'd be pretty simple for governments to control it as business owners don't want to get in legal trouble, and big country like the US could impose sanctions on trade partners that don't shut down the full nodes. So arguably not decentralized at all. Compare this with (potentially) millions of users running full nodes: Me, you, your dad, uncle and friends. All over the world. Cannot be killed, period.

Miners would love larger blocks as it ultimately increases the miner fees.

Users? Benefit from L2 solutions that make fees even smaller than they are now. And this is in the works. No need for large blocks. But we benefit from decentralization, A LOT. Else just use USD/EUR/JPY/GBPO/... no point in bitcoin.

Companies? They "socialize" the cost of scaling bitcoin. How? Larger blocks = no development cost to implement solutions that make bitcoin more efficient. More details, it's a great post

Last thing, the block size increase is not about the size of blocks.

And I wanted to keep it short.. lol It's worth understanding, though.