While I'm still curious to see SegWit in action to find out if the scaling claims prove to be accurate, there have been some
fairly strongly worded warnings doing the rounds online. Anyone care to refute or debunk? Or is there a thread about that article elsewhere on the board that I've missed?
I think the majority of the people do not even want to bother trying to refute such stuff anymore. The problem is that biased people keep spewing up articles with either completely misleading information, half-truths and whatnot in an attempt to completely undermine Segwit. Just read through the recent article on the Bitcoin Classic (Segwit vs. Flexible Transactions) and you will see (it has been mentioned on #bitcoin-core-dev). Some aren't sure whether Garzik truly believes some of the nonsense that was written on there.
Here is a small example:
In practice, based on the average transaction size today and the types of transactions made, the block size limit is expected to have a maximum limit of ~1.7 MB post-SW.
They use outdated date to make it seem like Segwit brings only a little improvement for a 'lot of complexity'. Latest transaction pattern usage review shows that we can expect around 2.1 MB.
3.6 Once activated, SW cannot be undone and must remain in Bitcoin codebase forever.
If any critical bugs resulting from SW are discovered down the road, bugs serious enough to contemplate rolling it back, then anyone will be able to spend native SW outputs, leading to a catastrophic loss of funds.
Segwit can be undone with a hard fork, just like any other soft fork. Surely it won't be simple very simple due to the Segwit UTXO, but it will not lead to a catastrophic loss of funds (exaggerating).
I'm too tired to even attempt to refute anything technical or economical, and there are surely people that are better fit to do this. You could ask on IRC in #Bitcoin (you may get lucky).
The idea of a free-market block size limit is also absurd as it gets. If anything has been shown in the Bitcoin world, it is that markets behave irrationally. Bitcoin was never intended to have a free market block size limit as per Satoshi (who they seem to quote only when and in a context that suits themselves).