Gregory Maxwell: major ASIC manufacturer is exploiting vulnerability in Bitcoin Proof of Work function — may explain “inexplicable behavior” of some in mining ecosystem
TLDR - the real reason for miners not wanting to activate the Segwit scaling upgrade seems to have been brought to light. The change to Segwit would block an exploit/optimization that their mining hardware contains. This hardware, not enabled in the firmware shipped publicly, gives something like a 20-30% advantage to the miner. The exploit/optimization results in more empty blocks, and incentivizes the miner to block most upgrades to the Bitcoin protocol, most notably and pressingly Segwit. BIP purposes SF to eliminate this behavior, quite possibly to be included in 0.14.2
