I hope this has provided some useful food for thought-- but really, what I think is missing is your thoughts. What requirements do you feel aren't being met by Core that would leave you asking such a question? (I could guess, but communication is much better than guessing.)
Some expressed the view that while SigWit has its potential, it is something never been tried before, therefore should be given more time for thorougher test; worse, some felt that it represents a development that has deviated from Satoshi's vision and eventually, led to increased complexity of the protocol to such degree that it would be forbidding to most startups.
BR,
Eric
Eric, Segwit is crucial to the development of Bitcoin for many important reasons, other than the size benefit, two of them(both cannot be resolved without Segwit) being fixing malleability issue and much faster signature verification(which is also vital to future block size increase), I am sure you understand the importance of both as a wallet provider.
Overall, there seems to be a sense of helplessness. Some reflected on why the Chinese had so little say in the matter and some urge that the Chinese should form their own core development team and create their own fork.
Let me know what you think as always.
Frankly that's why I believe the Chinese should not buy into the rhetoric of Bitcoin Classic developers, who clearly have a political agenda(in addition to the absymal record in development of many among them), and supported by people with questionable motives, as Toomim openly acknowledged in the Chinese miners Wechat group.
You might think that choosing Classic over Core is the best option to get a short-term block size expansion, but Classic's plan doesn't stop here, they also intend to decide changes to the code by popular vote:
https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/compare/master...bitcoinclassic:master , within an environment clearly to the disadvantage of users and businesses in China and many other nations, it's not hard to imagine what most of the outcomes of such votes would be-representing only the opinion of English speaking Bitcoiners, even if we neglect all the technical reasons why it's an amusingly bad idea.
While I cannot eliminate the possibility that certain Core devs working for Blockstream may indeed share a vision with their employer as to what Bitcoin's future would be, the consciousness they have thus far displayed, I believe, is in alignment with the general interest of Chinese Bitcoiners, e.g., one of the most important reasons why Core devs oppose to a rash block size increase is the network connectivity problem of people living in China, and Blockstream is, as far as I know, the only company with both the technical expertise and willingness to work on some of the best solutions to the problem: weak blocks and IBLT, and they are working on it. In contrast with this is Classic devs' clear lack of long term sustainable plan to the block size problem, what if 2 MB blocks are filled up again, do we just double it every year, ad infinitum? I am sure you understand that this is unsustainable.
Also, if it's possible for such a political fork to take place, it would set a very bad precedent, as any interest group can possibly pay some developers to create a campaign to further split the network, by tweaking with some block parameters, for example, imagine some developers try to appeal to the interest of gamers with high-end GPUs by promising them a change of PoW function, under the banner of "re-decentralizing" the network, in which case the miners' opinion would not even matter to them. After all, it never costs much to pay for an army of shills to flood the online discussion forums to create a superficial "economic majority", like what we are seeing now, and economically heavy Western Bitcoin exchanges and payment processors certainly have never liked Chinese miners and would, probably never try to stop such a motion if it's indeed put forth.
I am not a Core dev and I could not speak for them, my personal suggestion would be: wait for Segwit to roll out, and if anything goes wrong with it, or the blocks are filling up again, we can push them harder for a block size raise, while wait for weak blocks and IBLT to be implemented, at which time they would have no further excuse, and it would be the moment of truth when we understand if they are truly sincere or not.
