SegWit2x – who the heck is supposed to understand this?

TL:DR: on the 1st of August 2017 a soft-fork should have happened. But now almost everyone agrees on accepting the SegWit and a gradual increase of a block to 2MB in 6 six months. The needed support for the SegWit was lowered from 95% to a more realistic 80% and since almost everyone is in favor of the SegWit we will probably see it very soon.

So we managed to avoid the worst. Your Bitcoins aren’t in danger, because there will be no seperation.

What is a SegWit

To put it simply, it’s an upgrade that fixes a few errors and increases the amount of transactions that can fit into a single block. Almost everyone can agree on what makes SegWit useful, well apart from the chinese company Bitmain that mines Bitcoin and makes hardware which is used to mine Bitcoin.

Bitmain has been trying to delay the SegWit and make it look bad in several different ways. But later it was found that hardware made by Bitmain uses one of the errors to increases the mining speed by about 20%.

To allow Bitcoin to grow, the owners of about 80% of mining power of Bitcoin have met in New York in May 2017 with the owners of several exchanges and came to a compromise. The SegWit will be accepted and the block size will be increased to 2MB.

My personal view

Bitmain are obviously doing what is the best for their company. But that isn’t necessarily the best for the crypto community, or the Bitcoin network or the price of Bitcoin.
Their recent actions show that they would very much like to have a monopoly for both the hardware and software around Bitcoin and their PR makes it clearly visible that they think they know what is best for Bitcoin (and their company).