Bitcoin’s New Block Size Proposal ‘SegWit’ Could Help CryptoCurrency “Go Dark”
Segregated Witness or SegWit, a proposed upgrade to the Bitcoin protocol, could become the new iteration of the Bitcoin code if 95 percent of the hash power adopts the solution. Miner-adoption sits just shy of 25 percent currently, though, as users mull other options, like Bitcoin Unlimited or Bitcoin Classic, in Bitcoin’s “Civil War,” as it’s been called. Privacy enhancing features of the SegWit code, if adopted, could be a boon for Bitcoin prices in 2017, suggest proponents of the ‘block size’ solution. Bitcoin investor and serial entrepreneur Trace Mayer stresses how SegWit’s code could....
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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....
Bitcoin Unlimited, one of the Bitcoin Core software forks introduced in late 2015, garnered much attention in recent months. The project gained hash power support from several new Bitcoin mining pools, including ViaBTC, GBMiners and BTC.TOP, while node adoption appears to be on the rise as well. The central idea behind Bitcoin Unlimited — specified in “Bitcoin Unlimited Improvement Proposal 001” (BUIP001) — is to hand control of Bitcoin’s block size limit to users and miners. Or perhaps more accurately: to make this control more explicit and easier to handle. Here’s how. The Proposal. The....
Amid a spike in transactions and price hike, the Bitcoin Core team has released its version 0.13.1 update. Notably, this release is the first to implement Segregated Witness transactions in the Bitcoin protocol. While controversial, SegWit is one step towards freeing up a degree of block space. Bitcoin has suffered full blocks and backlogs intermittently....
The block-size limit debate has taken a turn now that some of Bitcoin's biggest mining pools are publicly endorsing BIP 100 (Bitcoin Improvement Proposal 100) instead of backing a Bitcoin XT blockchain fork. So far, F2Pool, BTCChina, BitFury, KnCMiner, 21 Inc. and several smaller pools have come out in support of this alternative proposal. Combined, this represents well over half of all hashing power on the Bitcoin network. While these endorsements are just a show of support, and do not trigger a change of the block-size limit or a blockchain hard fork as Bitcoin XT is programmed to do,....
The block size debate has gotten to a point that some bitcoin observers think it could doom bitcoin. Bitcoin has defied all the bitcoin naysayers and prospered, recently setting record market capitalization. Will internal strife prove its ultimate undoing? A recent proposal designed to appease both sides in the bitcoin scalability debate may be doomed because of the way in which it became public. Laura Shin, a Forbes columnist, reported on the Extension Blocks proposal and its role the increasingly contentious conflict over changing the bitcoin block size. Proposal Didn’t Follow Protocol.....