I’ll start by saying that I read your post with anticipation, and agree with you on some of your high-level premises. I have no-doubt that your attempt was an effort in pragmatism—to soften both sides stances in order to reach an agreement—which will benefit everyone involved in Bitcoin.

> sending over 100 satoshis/byte and still waiting for over 12 hours

Adjust your algorithm to send more.

> We took risks

Everyone does, every day.

> sending to [our exchange] were sending over 100 satoshis/byte and still waiting for over 12 hours

Offer to reimburse part or all of the fee. You’ll make it back on their first trade.

> starting to make SWIFT look attractive

Use it, by all means. I had no idea they allowed Bitcoin transfers.

> For entrepreneurs who are busy running their company and trying to keep their products and platforms running for the paying customers, it can be challenging to also try to focus on making serious changes to the core bitcoin protocol

Oh, wow, this is ridiculous. Did you seriously think that starting a Bitcoin startup was going to be easy? You know what they say about easy: if it was easy, everyone would be doing it…

Ask not what Bitcoin can do for you, ask what you can do for Bitcoin!

> SegWit is a good “lego block” foundation advancing the ecosystem

Hurray!

> It is also very complex, technically

Which is why it took a while.

P.S. It also makes your systems less complex by eliminating malleability.

> governance-wise

Prove it.

> from a technical readiness standpoint

The folks who built the *entire network* are convinced it’s ready. It’s going to take a while to activate, at best, and then there’s a period for everyone to come up to speed.

If you cannot keep up, you may have started your company too soon.

> This is why we’re working on a “SegWit for CTOs” style document

Really? Any Bitcoin company with a CTO that doesn’t understand SegWit at this point is obviously doomed.

> I don’t think it would be responsible to endorse it unless we’ve performed rigorous analysis and testing ourselves

I’m willing to bet you’ve never performed such an analysis of the current Bitcoin network. If you have, it’ll be trivial to adapt the code you’ve written to SegWit, so I suspect you have not.

> Testnet has been SegWit-active for a while now, but little testing has been done by major bitcoin network players

Chop chop! You’re major bitcoin network players, right?

> Our understanding is its only been tested by core devs on testnet

I’m more than confident the 50 companies signally readiness have tested it as well.

Not to mention that “only tested by core” is F.U.D. that could be much more clearly written as “tested to death by core, above and beyond the way they, the only testers of every other Bitcoin Core release in history, which has operator 24x7x365 since 2009 with just a single issue.

> the main worry would be that this testing may not match what enterprises actually need

Oh, damn, now you’re *really* crossed the line.

Enterprises don’t use Bitcoin yet Enterprises, in my and every developer I’ve *ever* discussed the matter with, agree that the open source community is LIGHT YEARS ahead of the VAST MAJORITY of Enterprise software development in terms of code quality and testing.

At some point you—in fact at *every* point—have to assess your position. I started this discussion with a knee-jerk “make the blocks bigger” position.

Yet after listening carefully, with a well-seasoned technical ear, it soon became obvious that increasing the block size before improving efficiency and eliminating technical-debt would likely be harmful to decentralization—and therefore—the integrity of the network.

There may have been good arguments when it was possible SegWit would never get done—but that didn’t happen. It’s not vaporware, never was, never will be.

SegWit increases transaction capacity by incentivizing everyone using the network to adopt is as quickly as they need a transaction capacity increase.

I’m going to stop there, having said more than enough.