Summer of SegWit: Bitcoin Core Begins Segregated Witness Soft Fork
It is going to be a wild summer for the price of Bitcoin. The only certainty in the space will be change. Watching the roller coaster is fine for the speculators out there, but maybe new protocol reinforcements will help spur prices higher, and stabilize the environment. The much-hyped Segregated Witness application is about to be brought into play, if it hasn’t already, by the Bitcoin Core developers. Confirming the unconfirmed. News of the advancement forward of Segregated Witness, or SegWit, made waves on Reddit’s r/Bitcoin Thursday afternoon in the form of a single forum discussion....
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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....
Last week, Bitcoin Core version 0.13.1 was released, officially bringing Segregated Witness (SegWit) to Bitcoin. 4 days in, 13.7% of Bitcoin nodes has already upgraded to Bitcoin Core 0.13.1, supporting the activation of SegWit. SegWit is an innovative scaling technology developed and introduced by the Bitcoin Core development team. Once it reaches a soft fork activation threshold, it will separate the transaction signatures from the initial transactional data, which immediately increases the capacity of blocks and eliminate transaction malleability. Like all soft forks, the SegWit release....
“Segregated Witness [Segwit] is the most radical and irresponsible protocol upgrade Bitcoin has faced in its eight year history,” wrote the pseudonymous author Jaqen Hash’ghar for Medium. “The push for the [Segwit] soft fork puts Bitcoin miners in a difficult and unfair position to the extent that they are pressured into enforcing a complicated and....
Segregated Witness, Bitcoin Core’s innovative scaling solution, is expected to be released on November 15 2016, in Bitcoin Core’s 0.13.1 release. Bitcoin Core developer Pieter Wuille made the announcement in the Bitcoin-dev mailing list, in which he stated that BIP 141, or the SegWit soft fork proposal, could be activated on the 15th of November if the 95% hashpower validation threshold is reached. Wuille wrote: “Following the BIP9 recommendation to set the versionbits start time a month in the future and discussion in the last IRC meeting, I propose we set BIP 141's start time to November....
Bitcoin Core 0.13.1 was released last week, which means miner signaling on the proposed Segregated Witness (SegWit) soft fork will start soon. If activated, SegWit offers a number of benefits, one of which is an effective block size limit increase to about 1.6 to 2 megabytes, depending on the types of transactions included in blocks. If and when Segregated Witness is activated on the Bitcoin network, users will be able to take advantage of the added network capacity immediately — if their wallets are “SegWit-ready.” For users to enjoy this added block space, therefore, much will depend on....