Author: Gavin Andresen 2015-12-08 15:12:10
Published on: 2015-12-08T15:12:10+00:00
Gavin Andresen, a prominent figure in the Bitcoin community, has laid out a roadmap for scaling Bitcoin and increasing its capacity. However, he received some initial pushback from Greg Maxwell, another well-known member of the community. Maxwell questioned why segwit should be implemented as a soft fork, arguing that it would only complicate consensus-critical code. Additionally, fixing the O(n^2) sighash problem would require a hard fork and could be easier to fix with a fundamentally broken system. While segwit would require a hard or soft-fork rollout, it is expected to be quicker than the P2SH rollout. However, it may take six months to a year before any relief from the current problems of blocks filling up is seen. Segwit is also expected to make the current bottleneck (block propagation) a little worse due to extra fraud-proof data, but the benefits are seen as worth the costs. There seems to be a difference of opinion on whether the current state of affairs is acceptable to the heaviest users of the Bitcoin network, who generate tens of thousands of transactions per day on behalf of their customers. This may present a barrier to quickly getting consensus on scaling and increasing capacity.
Updated on: 2023-06-11T01:39:23.914573+00:00