Segregated Witness, Part 1: How a Clever Hack Could Significantly Increase Bitcoin's Potential

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....

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 and second partsof our three-part Segregated Witness series covered how it works and what it does. In this final part we explore what it means for the block-size dispute.

The long-lasting block-size dispute has catapulted into 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 a centerpiece of a scalability “roadmap” set out by Bitcoin Core. To find out where the broader development community stands on Segregated Witness, Bitcoin Magazine reached out to library and wallet developers; those who will need to do the heavy lifting in order to utilize....

Segregated Witness has been merged into Bitcoin Core. During a Bitcoin Core development meeting on Thursday, it was decided that the code for Segregated Witness (SegWit) is ready to be merged into the master branch. According to Bitcoin Core contributor Eric Lombrozo, the merge is expected to take place in the coming days. Why This Is a Big Deal. Segregated Witness is an improvement to the Bitcoin protocol that enables a variety of new features and enhancements to the network. Much of the Bitcoin community is excited about this change due to its effective increase to the Bitcoin block size....

Segregated Witness might be the most significant improvement to the Bitcoin protocol to date. The innovation is set to fix transaction malleability, offers an effective block size increase, enables development flexibility and more. After months of coding, Segregated Witness is getting close to rollout, as a pull request was submitted to Bitcoin Core earlier this week. How close to roll-out exactly? As with any change to the Bitcoin protocol, that is hard to predict. A Segregated Witness timeline ... Each improvement to the Bitcoin protocol starts with an idea. The Segregated Witness idea....