Rumors has it that segwit2x accidentally created a hard fork during test phase, thus dragging Bitcoin down more than 8% (and along with it the entire market, as you can see below: all red, blood on the streets, yada, yada, yada...)
Wether this is true or not, well, that's another story.
But what's true is that inside the Bitcoin world there's a fight going on. There is a fundamental, ideological debate between greed (miners) and growth (developers). Please don't take these words as derogatory, there's healthy greed, sometimes, as there is unhealthy growth, sometimes. Just look at them at some irreconcilable positions.
Even if August 1st will pass on without major problems for Bitcoin, which is something I doubt, looking at the markets, the contradiction will remain.
Power and Control
Bitcoin was created as a way to take control from a centralized system made by a toxic combination of state and banks, and give it back to the average user, in an untampered way. 7 years later, there is a new form of control. It's not state or banks, it's the people who are making the network tick. The miners. And, to some extent, the developers as well.
As long as there will be the tiniest niche in the underlying protocol of a crypto currency, there will be people willing to take advantage of it. Maybe not in the beginning, maybe not all at once, but there will be a need for control. Just 2-3 years ago, if you were telling somebody that China will become a super power in crypto universe, all you would get would have a been a giant laughter.
Proof of Work, as the niche which gives leverage to the miners, is already a toxic management approach. It's time to think at something else. Ethereum is signaling for a while that it will move to Proof of Stake, with Casper. Steemit (and BitShares and PeerPlays) is using DPoS for more than a year, with fantastic results.
And, in case you don't know, there are even other ways to validate the transactions in a blockchain, apart from PoW and PoS. I'm talking about something called Proof of Burn, in which you get "hashing power", or the chance to mine a block, by spending your own coins, or "burning" them, sending them to an address which will destroy them. This makes computing power completely useless for the network health, because you can actually mine with your Raspbeery Pi (which is something I'm doing for a while) or even with your phone, if you write some basic wallet for it.
This currency is called Slimcoin, it's listed on Coinmarketcap, and, believe it or not, it's one of the few cryptos actually soaring in the middle of this war (screenshot taken a few minutes ago).
Of course, Slimcoin's capitalization is ridiculous, but the signal is important.
Capital is moving away from toxic governance structures.
I'm a serial entrepreneur, blogger and ultrarunner. You can find me mainly on my blog at Dragos Roua where I write about productivity, business, relationships and running. Here on Steemit you may stay updated by following me 
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