Gregory Maxwell,

Criticizing 148 without suggesting a specific alternative leaves the community in disarray.

I know you are emphasizing patience.  But at the same time, with your patience we are allowing ourselves to get dicked for longer than necessary.

I think that core could easily develop code that could create a solid/reliable date/height based activation to allow miners to create SegWit block candidates and having nodes fully verify them.  Shaolinfry is the only person Ive seen actually make such a proposal: https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2017-April/014049.html.  His makes it so that SegWit default gets activated at the end of the BIP9 signalling timeframe instead of default leaving it non-activated.

I agree that 148 is is not ideal.  Non-SegWit signaling blocks are not a Denial of Service, given that other activation methods are available.  Someone just needs to code something up that is better that we can all use in a satisfying time frame.  So far 148 is the most practical and reliable method I'm aware of.

If 148 causes orphaning and a fork, I don't think such really matters in the long term.  The non-SegWit miners will probably just quickly give up their orphans once they realize that money users like being able to have non-mutable TX IDs.  If they do create a long lasting branch... well that is good too, I'd be happy to no longer have them in our community.  Good luck to them in creating a competitive money, so that we can all enjoy lower transaction fees.

SegWit has already undergone enough testing.  It is time to activate it.

Cheers,
Praxeology Guy