On the Detriments of Segregated Witness for Bitcoin

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....

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 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....

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....