After some miners declared a hard fork war on Bitcoin to give miners power over the block size, anonymous Bitcoin developer shaolinfry declared a soft fork war in response (so called “user-activated soft fork”, or UASF) aimed at forcing miners to respect segregated witness rules.

It’s interesting to compare consequences of possible outcomes of each war.

If either of these proposals fails to get off the ground: that is, majority of miners ignore HF or majority of economy does not enforce segwit, nothing really changes.

If any proposal leads to a harsh split, the outcome is the same for both of them: majority of hashrate diverges from the rules enforced by economic majority, uncertainty leads to price drop, and (unless things get corrected in one direction or the other), Bitcoin is doomed, experiment is over, everyone can go home.

So what happens when either of proposals actually succeeds?

In the first case, if miners convince stakeholders that Bitcoin Unlimited is the way to go, stakeholders would effectively grant miners the requested powers and accept the cost of risk and difficulties adopting hard forks.

However, if UASF succeeds, that is, users convince miners to enforce additional rules (or at least not interfere with them), then miners would accept the limit of their powers and agree with priority of the users in decision-making around consensus.

The win of a hard fork would demonstrate that Bitcoin is governed by producers of proof of work, and majority of users would simply delegate all “checks and balances” to a minority of users who run mining pools.

The win of a UASF would demonstrate that the role of miners remains restricted and the rules of the protocol are decided by the whole community of users, including miners.