[Zarath]

Also add that the largest manufacturer and user of ASICs is most likely covertly using something called AsicBoost [1], a patented [2] chip optimization for Bitcoin's proof of work. They (Jihan Wu/Bitmain/Antpool) have stated that the capability is manufactured into their chips but they are currently not using it [3] for the greater good of Bitcoin, though this would cost them millions in mining profits.

Activating Segwit as a soft fork would prevent the ability to use AsicBoost and therefore a lot of people suspect that most of this debate is actually just a delay tactic by Bitmain to maintain their mining dominance with covert AsicBoost. They likely have no intention to support Bitcoin Unlimited (they don't seem to be running the software).

Segwit recently activated on Litecoin only after the threat of a User Activated Soft Fork (much easier to execute on Litecoin). The Segwit activation threshold on Litecoin was 75% of the hashpower (compared to 95% on Bitcoin). At one point Segwit had achieved 75% of the hashpower until suddenly 3 mining pools increased their hashpower by about 300% in 1 day to block Segwit (the same day that Jihan Wu, CEO of Bitmain declared that the Litecoin miners to be shipped needed "additional firmware testing"). These pools were Antpool, LTC.top, and LTC1BTC [4], all of which controlled a much smaller fraction pre-segwit. For this reason, it's likely that Jihan Wu controls both Antpool and BTC.top and therefore about 30% of the hashpower on Bitcoin.

[1] https://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvename.cgi?name=+CVE-2017-923... [2] https://bitcoinmagazine.com/articles/bitmain-may-be-infringi... [3] https://blog.bitmain.com/en/tag/asicboost/ [4] https://www.litecoinpool.org/pools