BitTorrent’s Bram Cohen: Miners ‘Threw Tantrum’ to Delay SegWit

BitTorrent creator Bram Cohen has said SegWit was, in fact, a “bug fix” and that miners were delaying it because they were not “running a charity.”

Speaking on a panel with Charlie Shrem at the Blockstack Summit in California, Cohen spent several minutes delivering his personal verdict on SegWit.

Specifically, he concentrated on the delay in reaching a consensus on the technology’s implementation from the perspective of the Bitcoin mining community.

“The expectation was that that it would go through quickly because there wasn’t any objective reason to block it,” he explained.

“And then the miners just [...] threw a tantrum and held it up a couple of years.”

The comments were captured by entrepreneur and commentator Tuur Demeester who was present in the audience at the event.

@bramcohen on Bitcoin scaling: “segwit was basically a bug fix” ... “Miners have illusion of power, threw a tantrum to preserve asicboost”. pic.twitter.com/KUr1tGkiTK — Tuur Demeester (@TuurDemeester) July 27, 2017

“It was kind of ridiculous,” Cohen continued, “and apparently it was just over AsicBoost. It’s not like miners are running charities; they’re trying to make money.”

Cohen has received praise from cryptocurrency sources for his work on Lightning Network, will Blockstream’s Adam Back earlier this month revealing the two had discussed the idea of Lightning micropayments for BitTorrent.