The way some people are talking about segwit/segwit2x/big blocks is as if there is some sort of existential crisis like the polar ice caps were going to fall off from the excess heat from miners. For example, while this has a couple of good technical points: https://medium.com/@lukedashjr/the-segwit-2x-beta-review-and-thoughts-ca4806... There is this little confused bit of reasoning: "Next up is "testnet5". It's a new testnet, for reasons never made clear to me. It would seem if you wanted to test a change to Bitcoin, you'd test it as a change to testnet rather than make a new one. It's not clear to me why a new testnet was created instead." I think, if you want to **test** activation of segwit with some different parameters, you might actually want to test it on a network that doesn't already have it activated. That means either: a) 51% attacking the existing testnet and rolling back to before the activation point b) start a new test network Did I make this clear, or am I just being sold some evil propaganda from $EVIL_EMPIRE Personally, the worst part about this whole disaster is we now have something that looks like assembly code looking for magic numbers in the coinbase field for segregated witness, instead of something straightforward, like, you know, incrememeting the transaction version in a way that clearly tells clients they need to upgrade. At least so far there has been no nation-state with guns telling people which code they need to run. (yet) Can some government just get it over with and issue Fedcoin already?