Thursday, October 27th, 2016. Segregated Witness (or SegWit) was added to Bitcoin Core. Will that day be the official end of the two-year-old “Block Size Debate?” will yesterday be the first step towards a mainstream-ready global decentralized digital currency? Whether you know it or not, Bitcoin has officially stepped into a new era of expansion and usability with the release of Bitcoin Core 0.13.1. Here, we’ll give you a cliffnotes version of what happens next and if we are even ready for SegWit. This can get uber-technical, but don’t worry. I’m not the one to lay out all the source code for you. What I can do is provide you with an understandable shorthand guide on how we all can start to enjoy its fruits, if we so choose to. And you see, Bitcoin’s 0.13.1 update doesn’t automatically activate SegWit for the world. Let us review what SegWit is and how it’s potential helps users going forward. First and foremost, it is capable of effectively increasing the effective block size or efficiency of each block by at least 60% over the current state, if not more. This is how block capacity will improve, according to Bitcoin Core: “Since old nodes will only download the witness-stripped block, they only enforce the 1 MB block size limit rule on that data. New nodes, which understand the full block with witness data, are therefore free to replace this limit with a new one, allowing for larger block sizes. Segregated witness, therefore, takes advantage of this opportunity to raise the block size limit to nearly 4 MB, and adds a new cost limit to ensure blocks remain balanced in their resource use (this effectively results in an effective limit closer to 1.6 to 2 MB). People who run upgraded wallets will be able […]
