The Great Node War of 2017 Has Begun

It seems to be definitive and the date is set to August 1st that many core and segwit supporters will try and activate a user activated soft fork to essentially override the miner’s decision to withhold it. While there was a little bit of hope with the Silbert agreement, it seems that many are realizing that we will never see eye to eye and the best chance of getting segwit implemented without any stipulations is to activate a UASF.

In the last week many big names in bitcoin, including developers who originally stayed out of the debate are now pushing on the side of a UASF and the community is calling everyone to be ready on the first. Whether or not this happens will rely completely on the community and what percentage of nodes are signaling the UASF. Currently that number is around 10-11% but it seems to be slowly growing. We will see in the next few days if the growth can sustain itself, but with nodes it is possible for one person to rent out multiple VPS servers and run nodes.

In my opinion this is going to start what I am calling the great node war of 2017 which is basically going to be core supporters vs unlimited supporters throwing thousands of dollars to acquire as much nodes as possible. If the percentage going for UASF nodes breaks a 25 or so percent, there are going to be a large amount of unlimited nodes that are going to come online to try and negate them. I think what we are going to see in an arms race and big players throwing cash at each other in order to push their views.

I personally don’t think that the UASF is going to be successful just because I think there is too much money in the unlimited camp, that is going to prevent that from happening. Notably Roger Ver and Jihan Wu, who were pretty successful in blocking segwit on litecoin with the buying up of asic hashpower, until they reached an agreement with Charlie lee, creator of litecoin. I don’t think there is an amount of money too high that they won’t sacrifice in order to backup their ideology and I just don’t think that there are enough people with the funds and knowhow to fight them.

I don’t know what is going to happen in the future, but something really needs to break at some point. Either that is a hardfork and the two sides go their separate ways or the stalemate continues for another year, the latter being more probable. This infighting does nothing but hurt the users and people looking to actually transact using bitcoin. Both sides are to blame at some point in this debate, but who comes out with a better outcome, who knows.