magic, business A newly introduced proposal for how the bitcoin network can be scaled to handle greater transaction volumes is gaining traction in its once divided development community.
Called segregated witness, the proposal was debuted by Blockstream co-founder Pieter Wuille at Scaling Bitcoin Hong Kong on 7th December . Arriving to general acclaim, it has already been hailed as a " turning point " by technologist Andreas Antonopoulos and positioned by Bitcoin Core developer Greg Maxwell as a solution that could provide a fourfold increase in capacity to the network in a "short time frame".
Most notable about segregated witness is that, unlike other proposed bitcoin improvements, it can be introduced to the network as a soft fork , meaning that it would avoid forcing all those running the bitcoin software to upgrade their clients in near-unison, thereby reducing the risk an upgrade splits the bitcoin blockchain.
That this could be accomplished has come as a surprise to many in the community, which has been embroiled in debate on how to scale the network in line with the ambitions of a startup sector which has attracted nearly $1bn in investments in 2015.
Wuille himself said in his talk that he had dismissed segregated witness as “non-viable” until recently, when it was revealed that it can be implemented as either a hard or soft fork, and there is growing consensus in the community that a soft fork is a preferred path to a solution.
Even more objective observers such as Digital Asset Holdings senior developer Miron Cuperman told CoinDesk: “There’s consensus that a soft fork is better. You can deploy it much sooner, because you just need the large majority, and in a hard fork you have to upgrade everyone. It’s a straightforward idea, the concept is not that risky or complicated.” At an open […]
