Jimmy Song, a Bitcoin developer, writes on how Bitcoin and blockchains work, covering forks, difficulty adjustments, ICOs and smart contracts.
HN commenters cite his posts to argue that blockchains only make sense for decentralized currency, and to explain Bitcoin Cash difficulty adjustments and smart contract limits.
Not really a "civil war"-- basically, bitcoin will keep working, even without the segwit upgrade if it gets delayed another year or two, and there might be some new altcoins that could be spun off from the current bitcoin, and there might be some brand confusion for a while as people wonder whether something incompatible with the bitcoin network is still bitcoin.
Here is some background:
http://www.coindesk.com/bitcoins-segwit2x-scaling-proposal-core-developers-react/
https://medium.com/@jimmysong/segwit2x-what-you-need-to-know-b747e6326266
https://bitcoinmagazine.com/articles/major-exchanges-will-consider-bitcoin-unlimited-new-asset/
https://bitcoinmagazine.com/articles/countdown-segwit-these-are-dates-keep-eye/
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14758587
https://www.reddit.com/r/sound8bits/comments/5xre70/the_origins_of_the_modern_blocksize_debate/
https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/6mz19j/potential_network_disruption/dk5pftg/
https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/6mgecw/frankensegwit8x_testnet_irrecoverably_forks_a/
https://bitcoinmagazine.com/articles/bitcoin-unlimited-miners-may-be-preparing-51-attack-bitcoin/ or https://medium.com/@WhalePanda/verified-chatlogs-why-jihan-and-jiang-want-to-block-segwit-at-all-cost-bbf068c5ce0f
how about some peer review yo, https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2017-July/014709.html and https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2017-July/014710.html
The difficulty re-targets once every 2016 blocks. Bitcoin Cash (BCH) has a added feature that re-targets the difficulty downward if blocks are being found too slowly. Bitcoin's Legacy chain doesn't do this so if enough hash power leaves the legacy chain in a short period of time it causes slow block times and people hope that if it gets bad enough there will be an inflection point where people abandon the legacy chain for Cash. The likely hood of that happening is anyone's guess.
[0] https://medium.com/@jimmysong/bitcoin-cash-difficulty-adjustments-2ec589099a8e
Speculation is that this is primarily due to Bitmain's announcement yesterday to hard fork if the UASF soft fork gets any momentum. Jimmy Song has a good analysis on this.
https://medium.com/@jimmysong/examining-bitmains-press-release-6b47b0646f15
This forking of Bitcoin is a required trial that the chain must go through to prove how resilient it is to this type of attack. It is unknown which chain will win in the event of a fork, maybe Ethereum will win, probably not PotCoin.
I just read this and thought ... didn't that transaction take place after the infamous tweet? Couldn't anyone have done it? Quick google and sure enough:
https://medium.com/@jimmysong/no-sean-spicer-didnt-make-some-secret-bitcoin-transaction-94b4851844b5
Why are so many so desperate to believe this immense hydra of a conspiracy theory?
Quite. This is a live topic for me. Wiser heads pointed me toward
https://medium.com/@jimmysong/the-truth-about-smart-contracts-ae825271811f
when I had my own blockchain moment. I think that immutability and lack of human judgement limit the usefulness of these things. And of course, not everything needs decentralised.
It's super unprofitable to mine BCH right now, at current exchange rates (assuming you could even sell BCH, which you can't). Miners stopped to wait for it to become profitable again, due to BCH's special difficulty adjustment. Details: https://medium.com/@jimmysong/bitcoin-cash-difficulty-adjustments-2ec589099a8e