Segregated Witness, Part 3: How a Soft Fork Might Establish a Block-Size Truce (or Not)

The ongoing block size dispute has catapulted to the center of attention again. One of the most talked-about developments is Segregated Witness, of which a public testnet iteration was launched last week. The innovation as recently proposed by Blockstream co-founder and Bitcoin Core developer Dr. Pieter Wuille is the centerpiece of a scalability “roadmap” set out by Bitcoin Core. But relying on Segregated Witness as the next step of Bitcoin’s scalability process is opposed by the recently launched Bitcoin Core fork Bitcoin Classic. Rather than a Segregated Witness soft fork, Bitcoin....

The long-lasting block-size dispute has catapulted into the center of attention again. One of the most talked about developments right now is Segregated Witness, of which a public testnet iteration waslaunched last week. The innovation as recently proposed by Blockstream co-founder and Bitcoin Core developer Dr. Pieter Wuille is a centerpiece of a scalability “roadmap” set out by Bitcoin Core. But relying on Segregated Witness as the next step of Bitcoin’s scalability process is contended by recently launched Bitcoin Core fork Bitcoin Classic. Rather than a Segregated Witness soft fork,....

The ongoing block size dispute has catapulted to the center of attention again. One of the most talked about developments right now is Segregated Witness, of which a public testnet iteration was launched last week. The innovation as recently proposed by Blockstream co-founder and Bitcoin Core developer Dr. Pieter Wuille is a centerpiece of a scalability “roadmap” set out by Bitcoin Core. But relying on Segregated Witness as the next step of Bitcoin’s scalability process is opposed by the recently launched Bitcoin Core fork Bitcoin Classic. Rather than a Segregated Witness soft fork,....

Segregated Witness, the proposal put forth by Blockstream developer Dr. Pieter Wuille, has been trumpeted as a block size scaling solution that gets around the difficult scenarios associated with increasing the block size utilizing a hard fork. But the problem is that, while Segregated Witness does provide benefit to the code, it misses one of the fundamental problems bitcoin has been experiencing: there are no true, long-term solutions on how to scale Bitcoin for mass-adoption. Instead, the focus has been on developing solutions on top of bitcoin. Further, the stigma associated with a....

If one proposal excited attendees at the recent Scaling Bitcoin workshop in Hong Kong, Bitcoin Core and Blockstream developer Dr. Pieter Wuille's Segregated Witness was it. Praised by many within the technical community, Segregated Witness is expected to improve Bitcoin's performance in a number of ways, while some even hope it might be the scaling solution that helps bring some peace back to the Bitcoin community. The first part of our three-part Segregated Witness series covered how it works. In this second part: What it does. Increasing the Effective Block Size Without Increasing the....