It's called User Activated Soft Fork or UASF for short. It could end up being nothing but it's worth noting the date.
There are currently two main ideas on how to scale Bitcoin. One camp is the called Bitcoin Unlimited and it's a proposal that allows the miners to adjust the block size as needed.
The other idea is called Segregated Witness or Segwit. This is a change in the way bitcoin transactions are counted towards the 1MB per block limit. It will allow slightly more transactions per block but also adds functionality that could allow other types of transactions. Those will be useful in some situations, e.g. paying the same entitiy many times over the course of the relationship.
Some people in the Segwit camp are tired of waiting so they are attempting to force the issue without the support of most miners. The date they picked is Aug 1.
Since very few miners support this move, it's not likely to succeed in my opinion, but nobody knows for sure.
> Some people in the Segwit camp are tired of waiting so they are attempting to force the issue without the support of most miners. The date they picked is Aug 1.
I don't understand why the bitcoin.org page sounds so alarmist. If the miners are not in on it why would some special Bitcoin blockchain (with alternative rules) matter, since miners could easily DoS this chain, if they wanted to, in case they don't support it?
Anyone can create their own chain with non-agreed-upon-rules (e.g. testnet3 or regtest), but that's just not Bitcoin precisely because it's practically ignored by miners (like a UASF).
Are bitcoin.org, themselves, supporters of this UASF?
You change the proof of work algorithm so that the existing miners can't use their fancy Bitcoin miners, and it becomes profitable to mine with GPUs instead.
There are currently two main ideas on how to scale Bitcoin. One camp is the called Bitcoin Unlimited and it's a proposal that allows the miners to adjust the block size as needed.
The other idea is called Segregated Witness or Segwit. This is a change in the way bitcoin transactions are counted towards the 1MB per block limit. It will allow slightly more transactions per block but also adds functionality that could allow other types of transactions. Those will be useful in some situations, e.g. paying the same entitiy many times over the course of the relationship.
Some people in the Segwit camp are tired of waiting so they are attempting to force the issue without the support of most miners. The date they picked is Aug 1.
Since very few miners support this move, it's not likely to succeed in my opinion, but nobody knows for sure.