The Segregated Witness Timeline: From Idea to Adoption in Six Steps

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 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.

Bitcoin Core developer Pieter Wuille has released Segregated Witness causing quite a stir in the industry. Segregated witness is the first step in allowing Bitcoin to scale by fitting more transactions in the current 1MB block size limit. It brings added benefits by removing the part of each Bitcoin transaction carrying the digital signature, instead....

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....

Future changes will be coming to Segregated Witness, but the solution will not act as a blocker for other network upgrades by any means. A new announcement was made by the Bitcoin Core developers, detailing how they are progressing with the Segregated Witness implementation. Some fundamental issues need to be addressed with the current proposal, and Jeff Garzik wrote a lengthy post on how the team is planning to discuss these topics. But the bigger question is: how will the Bitcoin community move forward from here on out? Even though soft forking Bitcoin to implement Segregated Witness is....