Bitcoin is a movement of people who run excellent software that enforces and guarantees some unique properties. Those properties give bitcoin a unique utility in the world: peer to peer, decentralized, unforgeable, secure, scarce, private, digital money.

Bitcoin has a high value because for nine years its users and developers have persevered to respond to every attack on the system without compromising decentralization, immutability, and proof of work behind every coin and transaction.

The latest attack on bitcoin, first to prevent SegWit activation and next to try to package it with a rushed hard fork is another attack that will fail. This is because Bitcoin's users do not bow down before would-be conquerors. We do not negotiate to allow some bad things in with the good. We do not allow the integrity of the system to be chipped away at.

Some weak bitcoiners, who focus on the short term price of bitcoin as denominated in US$ or some other fiat currency, but who don't fight for the long term utility of bitcoin will find themselves holding worthless tokens in a failed project. There's been easy money outside of bitcoin lately. But easy come, easy go. Bitcoin isn't easy because the long term value we fight for is so rare and precious. It didn't come easy, and everyone can also see, it won't go down easy either.

Running UASF is taking a stand for bitcoin's principles. It is a stand in favour of excellence in bitcoin software without compromise. And in the end, since bitcoin is software, it is a stand against corrupting bitcoin's excellence by those who are less than excellent in developing, testing and deploying software designed to produce bitcoin's unique properties.

Some readers here may not like it that the rest of us fight for these principles, especially when it scares away naive newcomers who don't understand what we are fighting for. This fight offers anyone the choice to hide in their basements without engaging in it and only to emerge when the fight is over. Of course, those people are also free to leave altogether by buying an altcoin or going to fiat.

But, you can also participate in the fight to preserve bitcoin's unique features. You can educate yourself and advocate for a solution your independent, reasoning mind has reached. I, for one, am happy to provide objective facts to anyone who is genuinely interested in learning more about bitcoin and about why users can always protect its principles by simply refusing to let anyone violate those principles.

Those who mistakenly hope that greatness can be achieved by not rocking the boat, by not taking courageous steps, by not doing hard work, and simply by riding on the coattails of those who have created great things in the past are mistaken. We must never take for granted that the great achievements made so far will stand without us protecting them. Today, we must run UASF nodes to ensure that SegWit is activated and that we preserve the principle that users bitcoin are the ones who enforce the rules of bitcoin.