Hey all,

Today I'm writing about a highly controversial issue within the bitcoin community, BIP148. Now, before you just close out or I lose your attention let's take a seriously healthy look. At the end I want to know if you're supporting or against and why. So please comment.

What is BIP148?

BIP148 is a patch upgrade for nodes, that fixes a vulnerability. This vulnerability is called CVE-2017-9230, or better known as "asicboost." Asicboost is ..essentially a potential exploit found in Bitmain hardware.

This allows the miner to essentially choose the number of hashes til block. According to Greg Maxwell, Blockchain CTO asicboost can increase a miners performance by "20%." It's my suspect that this is why certain predominate bitmain pools don't signal support for segwit.

What does this mean for miners?

With BIP148, you will still be able to mine standard blocks but would only be required to not mine segwit blocks that spend segwit transactions in addition to blocks that build on top of each other.

Beginning Aug. 1, 2017, nodes will reject non segwit blocks submitted by miners.

Possible consequences

There are many outcomes after Aug first. Nodes that continue to signal in favor of the resolution could cause the blockchain to split. This could be problematic because there could be assets issues that exchanges would not support.

What does this mean for traders?

In the event of a blockchain split, traders will have units on both side of the blockchain. Also, if the split is resolved then traders will have original amount all in one chain again. However, be cautious on trading after Aug 1, due to the fact that the legacy chain may be reorganized without prior warning.

At exchanges you may see beginning July 1, 2017:

• BTC 1.000000000
• Old 0.000000000
• BIP 0.000000000

Personally, I'm with Rusty Russell, waiting another 18 months to activate segwit (when BIP8 is activated), would just be frustrating, for everyone.

Let's get this over with, I feel that there would be better incentive (fees) in the long run on the newer network implementations then the status quo. This is why today, I'm signaling support.

Leave your thoughts below.