Segregated Witness Enters Final Testnet Stage, Includes Lightning Network Support

In the midst of a heated debate over block size and Bitcoin’s future, Bitcoin Core developers Dr. Pieter Wuille, Eric Lombrozo and Johnson Lau have launched a third iteration of the Segregated Witness “testnet.” Dubbed SegNet, the latest version of the Bitcoin test network includes several improvements over its predecessors, and is available to anyone who wants to try it or experiment. SegNet, like the previous versions, is essentially a clone of Bitcoin, specifically intended as a demo version. But while the two earlier SegNets were open only to developers working on the project, now....

Bitcoin Core developers have deployed an initial implementation of Segregated Witness on a special testnet for Bitcoin, dubbed SegNet. SegNet allows developers to experiment with the highly anticipated innovation set to increase Bitcoin’s scalability, extensibility and performance. SegNet, like the original Bitcoin testnet, is essentially a clone of Bitcoin, specifically intended as a demo version. Bitcoin Core developers Pieter Wuille, Eric Lombrozo, Johnson Lau, Alex Morcos and several others constructed a set of patches in order to establish the new testnet, with an early iteration of....

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.

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....

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,....