There are many projects running different development models but the process I mentioned is a general level principle that applies to any project as long as they are customer facing. It is not about the customer is right or wrong, it is the question of who has the power to decide
The Power to decide has always been available and a vocal minority is merely attempting to be reframe the narrative as one of control where none exists. Nodes and Miners have always had a choice and trying to pressure volunteer developers to work against some of their principles and to voluntarily code changes they believe are dangerous is not the appropriate way to go about matters.
I encourage other implementations to move forward and develop a great group of talented developers and to deploy more nodes. These contributions will help secure our ecosystem.
Back to SepSig-
Transaction signature verification is a very Interesting improvements being made possible that would be very difficult to pull off without SepSig-
https://twitter.com/aantonop/status/684760184074432512https://twitter.com/aantonop/status/684759586390302720https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2016-January/012194.htmlhttps://github.com/jl2012/bips/blob/segwit-checksig/bip-segwit-checksig.mediawikiP.S... I am saddened to hear that our comrade David Chaum has decided to introduce encryption schemes with security vulnerabilities. His past contributions will be honored but his future legacy tarnished.
I really appreciate an academic, research and facts based approach
The implementation of segwit will make some significant change on bitcoin architecture, thus require all the miners to upgrade to be fully compatible, which is unlikely to happen. As a result, network will be running on two different type of blocks where core miners will not be able to fully verify the new blocks from segwit miners (they see them as empty blocks and do no verification)
This means, the blockchain at that time is not a blockchain that contains all the proof of bitcoin transactions, at least in the eyes of a core client, the new segwit blocks are all empty, thus all the transactions in those segwit blocks are unknow to core clients
So, unless you force it as a hard fork, this kind of change will create lots of unexpected behavior from different clients, maybe a hard fork will happen right away after the first segwit block is mined
Back to the topic I'm interested
I still remember an old forum member said, "every technical solution, developer aware or not, have a political consequence." Currently the disagreement is on the different political consequence that various implementations could trigger, e.g. what you want bitcoin to become?
Based on my statistics as a broker and my polls on forum, I see most of the users do not use bitcoin as a payment service (especially now in some countries there are free and instant confirmed mobile payment services available, exchanging into bitcoin and pay a fee to do transaction is just insane.) People just buy bitcoin for long term storage, or speculate the price movement on exchanges. If you follow this usage pattern, then segwit will not provide too much benefit for existing users. If you want to provide the best service for majority of users, then the focus should be on the area that they concern most, like safety or high value, and I don't think scaling solutions will provide higher safety and higher value for bitcoin, maybe opposite
There is a false claim from banks that money's value are generated from its transaction demand (to cover the fact that their money does not have any cost), but for honest money with a production cost (like gold or bitcoin), their value are not generated through its transaction demand. The fact that gold has quit transaction for decades but still rise in value clearly denied that theory. Once you cleared this misconception, you will understand that raised level of bitcoin transaction capacity will not raise its value, its value would still be decided by the mining cost and long term storage demand
I believe that we should try all the best to make bitcoin more stable and valuable. When it is highly stable and valuable, all the smart finance people will be attracted to bitcoin and solve the scaling problem using what ever method they invented, much better than a couple of devs trying to achieve the impossible scaling mission on the blockchain. I think we don't need scale bitcoin too much if bitcoin is highly stable and valuable, the people with the right competence to directly use the blockchain is almost all here
A question from investor point of view: Current bitcoin architecture has passed test of time, and increased its value for thousands of times since the invention of bitcoin. If you change it to another architecture, can you guarantee the same level of performance? If you can not, why should an investor care about your new architecture which is not time tested?