Life itself just forces changes. What was acceptable a few months ago is no longer. I have to agree with Tone Vays who also changed his mind on leaving Bitcoin alone or not. It has to scale with Segwit, end of story. If Bitcoin stagnates then two things will happen; the centralization of the mining will escalate and the core developers, seeing no hope in innovating Bitcoin will leave to work on other open minded platforms. Who needs brilliant computer scientists and coders to just maintain Bitcoin. Just like we know nothing of the anonymous Satoshi Nakomoto, we know nothing of the anonymous shaolinfry who is the author of BIP148 (Could Satoshi have just made his second brilliant anonymous appearance). I consider this act impeccably timely. The forces who stubbornly and purposely are thwarting the adoption of segwit are some of the miners, particularly Bitmain. We had to put a stop to this and force the issue. This stagnation had to stop and the users demanded action. So by forcing the issue and setting a deadline to focus everyone's attention to it, very positive events are starting to play out. Bitmain has been utterly exposed in their recent plans to hard fork into basically a Chinacoin, Bitmain coin, Jihan Coin, etc. after Aug. 1 and now more and more exchanges, wallets and merchants are demanding, if not BIP148, then BIP91 and as a backup segit2x. It's all very technical differentiating between all of the BIP's but in a nutshell none of these hectic emergency gathering of forces to activate segwit before Aug. 1 would never have happened if it wasn't for the deadline of Aug.1. This trend is very positive and will isolate characters such as Jihan Wu and Roger Ver. If not for BIP148 then the negative forces would continue ad infinitum to delay and stall segwit.

Andy it's no mystery how BIP148 and User Activated Soft Fork came about. BIP148 was proposed to the Bitcoin community via various channels and the code was uploaded onto Github. The Bitcoin users, who run the thousands of nodes, ate it up eventually and this powerful grassroots of users inserted it into their bitcoin core nodes. Remember that the miners get the rewards for mining and securing coins but the nodes have to approve everything. When Segwit gets activated even though Barry Silbert will get the credit for "saving" Bitcoin it will actually be the thousands of users/node operators who will be unsung heroes for if it wasn't for BIP148 and UASF this would have never happened. After segwit gets activated (not if but when) we will call this sequel "The Return of the Users".