🖊️ [Analysis] This key part of Bitcoin's history is what separates it from competitors - Kyle Torpey

Bitcoin ($BTC) is the gold standard of crypto because of 2016's SegWit controversy, Forbes' Kyle Torpey argues. Two Bitcoin Improvement Proposals, BIP 91 and BIP 148, called for the adoption of SegWit. BIP 91 also added clauses on how SegWit was to be adopted and planned a block size based-hardfork. The lumping of these two issues under BIP 91 had drastic consequences, as the industry stood behind a larger blocksize upgrade, but users did not. At Consensus 2017, the "New York Agreement" showed industry leaders intent to force a hardfork, regardless of continuing dialogue over BIP 91 and 148. Timely research from crypto exchange Bitifinex altered history though, as data showed low support for a hardfork. “We now can point to a specific point in time, an actual event," Bitcoin Bull CEO Francis Pouliot said recently at Understanding Bitcoin, "It’s proof. It’s proof that the miners don’t decide the rules.” Regardless of the centralized support behind a hardfork, the majority of users did not want it, causing SegWit and SegWit alone to be amended to the Bitcoin network. As Torpey writes, the decentralized nature of social consensus was proven by SegWit, a test no other crypto could have passed.