Re: Post your SegWit questions here - open discussion - big week for Bitcoin!
I'm sure that you are a solid developer since you run a mining pool. Are you 100% confident that changing 4743 lines of code deep in the Bitcoin codebase won't have any issues? And what about wallet and 3rd party software? When you add it all up, we're looking at tens of thousands of lines of code changes, which guarantees roughly 150-500 bugs (industry average) in all of this software, of which 2-5 are potentially catastrophic...
A hard fork to 2MB would involve one line of code change and some late-night sweating and swearing for a week
Bitcoin Core does not follow normal industry standards in regards to defect rates, this is due to a huge emphasis on code review and testing by domain experts in cryptography and secure programming(a large amount of code written for SegWit is testing code), and when it comes to consensus critical code like SegWit extra care is taken during testing to prevent defects beyond what is typically done in areas of the codebase that aren't consensus critical. A hard fork to 2MB would involve one line of code change and some late-night sweating and swearing for a week
I agree that Bitcoin core has had a lower rate of bugs per lines of code than industry average, but when you increase complexity, and particularly when you increase the number of lines of code, you create defects. It's a hard and fast rule of the software industry, ask anyone (except a Java programmer).
I find it very hard to believe that implementing Segwit support in existing software will be easier than a 2MB hard fork, please site a source for this.