Why ViaBTC Rejects SegWit Soft Fork in Favor of Block Size Hard Fork: Interview With Haipo Yang

ViaBTC, which now controls around 15% of the network hashrate in combination with Roger Ver’s Bitcoin Unlimited pool, has called for a hardfork to upgrade bitcoin’s transaction capacity. “Drop the matter of SegWit, let’s hard fork together,” followed by a resounding no to the question of whether there is anything core could do to make ViaBTC support segwit, are just some of the public statements made by the new pool that has suddenly taken the fourth position in network hashrate distribution. I reached out to better understand the seemingly changing alignments in the great debate by asking....

In a clearly stated analysis and opinion blog post about the costs and benefits of doing either a hard fork to a 2 MB block size limit versus going with the “Hong Kong Compromise” Segregated Witness (Segwit) upgrade, Sam Cole offers the perspective from that of a Bitcoin miner in what options lie ahead. From a pragmatic perspective, Cole gives a very clear explanation of how the Segwit solution is the much safer, simpler and easier one and all of the potential risks of failure and negative disruption that the hard fork has. However, it’s clear from Cole’s post that he believes there’s....

“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 (Segwit), proposed as a solution to bitcoin’s block size debate, is 99% a full proposal, a development that hasn’t occurred without some controversy. Many expect Segwit to increase the volume of transactions without altering the block size. The change will ultimately be triggered with a soft fork, in which the majority of the nodes have to update to make the change compatible with older software versions. The method by which the proposal has been advanced has been called political by some, including Vitalik Buterin, co-founder of Ethereum. Segwit’s Benefits. Unlike other....

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....