2017-08-24
The blocksize war ends: users running nodes, not companies, set Bitcoin’s rules.
On 24 August 2017, Segregated Witness activated on Bitcoin, concluding a two-year governance conflict — the “blocksize war” — over how Bitcoin should scale. A coalition of companies and large miners had backed bigger blocks via an incompatible upgrade; users and node operators backed SegWit and, ultimately, prevailed. The big-block faction split off as Bitcoin Cash.
The technical result (malleability fixed, capacity increased, Lightning enabled) mattered less than the constitutional one: it settled who governs Bitcoin. Not miners, not companies — the users who run validating nodes.
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