In this talk, Andreas looks at scaling as an ongoing process. Using the example of the Internet which has "failed to scale, gracefully for 25 years", Andreas discusses the scaling debate and looks at how bitcoin will scale over the next several years.
Transcript
[AUDIENCE] Basically you are saying that we are depending on decisions of Chinese miners and pools. It is not our decision, it is the decision of the miners. [ANDREAS] No. There are five consensus communities in Bitcoin: developers, miners, exchanges, merchants, and wallets.
They [work] together. If you are a miner on a chain that doesn't have support from wallets, exchanges, or merchants, then you are mining a coin that you cannot sell, use, or exchange for anything. You are on the wrong side. Maybe you have the longest chain, but if the economic consensus is [elsewhere], you would be wasting your time, Of course, the miners know this.
They will not make a move until they believe that the economic consensus is with them, and are sure that this [chain] will be the most successful way forward. They are very conservative in that decision, because they have millions of dollars invested. Something else: a lot of miners today buy electricity on long-term contracts, for six months to one year. They have already paid for this.
They have all of the hardware. The only option they have is to run [that hardware] and pay it off. They cannot just turn off the hardware. They will continue no matter what the difficulty or the price is, or which side of the fork they are on.
They will not stop mining. So it is not just the miners making decisions [about Bitcoin]. [AUDIENCE] One additional question. Right now, no wallet is supporting SegWit.
I don't know if it will be integrated into the Bitcoin chain. [ANDREAS] Well, that is not entirely true. One wallet supports SegWit, the Core client fork by Pieter Wuille... that runs SegNet, and that supports SegWit; it works and has been tested for more than four months.
SegNet is the production level test network for Segregated Witness. It has been working for four months with a wallet that produces SegWit transactions. The standard is not finalized yet. Without a finalized standard, you [shouldn't implement it in your wallet].
I can guarantee you that other wallet developers, who want to stick around, are writing test code right now. They are trying to implement prototypes of SegWit. I am writing a prototype SegWit implementation... for my own uses as part of my company.
It is behind the scenes and everybody is waiting to see what happens, but the current road map... [will take effect] somewhere between April and June for the deployment of SegWit in production. Have some patience. [Laughter]