"Thermodynamic miracles... events with odds against so astronomical they're effectively impossible, like oxygen spontaneously becoming gold. I long to observe such a thing."
– Dr Manhattan, "Watchmen"

While much has been said about bitcoin, this discussion is not without its inherent problems.

One of the least addressed is the extent to which language itself has done disservice and damage to the development of what can only be considered a human technical achievement still struggling to be understood. Indeed, a great irony that has emerged with "bitcoin" is that a distributed system with so many intricate components can even be referred to in singularity at all.

It shouldn't be a surprise then that the idea that bitcoin can or should change the delicate balance of its protocol rules has been the biggest victim of limited vocabulary.

Should bitcoin become a 'digital currency' or 'digital gold'? Should this choice be dictated by scientific analysis, or guided by strict interpretation of vision? Any choice of words creates biases that, owing to the system's distributed nature, are incapable of being broadly enforced.

Bitcoin as an idea is now owned by many real people, all with different backgrounds, who understand the technology in different ways, who have different wants owing to their specific positions related to the protocol and who have profited differently from these associations.

What's clear now, however, is that at least three principal groups are capable of exercising power over that system – miners, entrepreneurs and developers – all of whom have different understandings of what "bitcoin" is and how they believe "bitcoin" should be. (Users, the fourth principal group, now seem caught on the sidelines in what can only be described as a power struggle that, at this point, has become entirely a game of human egos.)

Fueling the flames of the debate is a specific proposal stands to impact the balance of power between these parties, altering its ideological and sociological balance through technology.

Organized by investor Digital Currency Group and backed by miners and entrepreneurs, Segwit2x intends to enact Segregated Witness, a network optimization originally proposed by developers, before increasing bitcoin's hard-coded block size three months later.

As a political creation, it is a compromise of long-discussed compromises. But, while the code is a collection of pre-existing ideas, its enactment stands to be quite radical, impacting the system in a way that could, at the very least, reshape bitcoin's power structure, and at most, cause bitcoin to splinter into two.

But if it's true that language has impaired development and understanding of bitcoin, so too has it failed to properly categorize how stakeholders see themselves as players on a grand stage, writing a narrative with the ability, they believe, to impart lasting change on the world.

The following attempts to use – broad generalizations – to relay my experiences and interactions with the various constituents in the hope of explaining their positions and views on the scaling debate in aggregate, and how they relate to repercussions of the Segwit2x proposal.

So who is watching the scaling?

The Entrepreneurs

 

The Developers

 

The Miners

 

The Monster

 

The Ozymandias choice

 

Read more about them here: http://www.coindesk.com/watches-bitcoins-watchmen-scalings-great-game-egos/