Bitcoin Showdown - After a long sharp battle between Bitcoin Core and the original Bitcoin vision I see a hard fight coming up

Why the Bitcoin community split into two fighting groups

For the last couple years the blocksize issue was one of the main reasons why the Bitcoin price declined substantially. People are scared because over time the Core team spread rumors that the original vision of Satoshi does not work, which meant do not scale on the Blockchain. The community got confused and parted to the small Blockers and big Blockers. Satoshi's vision was to scale on chain implementing the changes using hardforks. Core's vision is to scale off chain via softforks using a complete new protocol which is called Lightning.

Censorship on Bitcointalk and /r/bitcoin

A huge user base left the original Bitcoin forum and the reddit community /r/Bitcoin. Any content which is contra competing Blockchains is mostly allowed and any good news about competing Blockchains is moderated and will mostly get deleted. It seems like the big miners will not hold the course for very much longer

Congested Bitcoin Network

Since January 2016 the Bitcoin network is very congested which means that transaction growth is halted. The maximum amount of transactions are reached a long time ago. If you still want to transact in Bitcoin you will have to pay outrageous fees which shrinks the network to only rich countries. The network does not grow anymore which shows in terms of Bitcoin price.

User base switches to other Blockchain based alternatives

People who like to transact in cryptocurrencies and don't want to pay the high Bitcoin fees have discovered alternative coins which confirm transactions faster and have lower fees. Some coins are e.g. Litecoin, Ethereum, Monero, Dash, Nxt. While Bitcoin Core devs make fun of competing Blockchains, they actually gain in value at very fast speed. Bitcoins head start from 2009 is declining.

Blocksize pressure is building up

The big Chinese miners are really getting worried because on the one hand they do like Core's Blockchain engineering qualities but on the other hand Core is completely changing the role of Bitcoin (from an electronic cash system to a settlement system) which holds the Bitcoin price back from achieving past highs.
On top of that, the past halving occurred weeks ago which also cuts miner's profits in half.

Chinese miners & some Core devs signed an agreement in February 2016. Core promised SegWit by April and a 2MB hardfork by July. At the moment it seems like that Core will not deliver one or the other promise.

The Chinese miners (Antpool, F2Pool, BTCC Pool, BW.com) will be under 'Zugzwang'. They certainly do not want to loose money and want the network to scale the sooner the better.

Deadline August 2016

It all depends on how long miners can afford to loose money while scaling options are being delayed watching on the side lines other Blockchains grow rapidly.

Comments

If you share or not share my views, please leave a comment. @crypt0, @stringstory what do you think about the current blocksize Bitcoin situation? By the way, do you ( @craig-grant ) know Tai Zen's steemit handle? I like his videos.