Author: Jeff Garzik 2015-12-16 20:38:30
Published on: 2015-12-16T20:38:30+00:00
Segregated Witness (SegWitness or SW) is a proposal being presented in the context of Scaling Bitcoin. Its useful attributes include addressing a major malleability vector, however, it is not a short-term scaling solution. SW creates two views of each transaction and block - blocks and extended blocks - which are rendered to clients depending on compatibility level. The roll-out pace cannot be judged simply by soft fork speed as updating bitcoin-core and bitcoinj, and then updating apps will add many more months to the timeline. SW requires merchants to upgrade almost immediately and has a more complex economic policy, new game theory, and risks associated with creating a second economic resource. It also introduces new economics complexities and does not provide scaling in the short term. A "short term bump" hard fork block size increase addresses economic and ecosystem risks that SW does not. Bump + SW should proceed in parallel, independent tracks, as orthogonal issues. Hard forks provide much stronger validation and ensure the network operates at a fully trustless level. An SW hard fork could also add several zero-filled placeholders in a Merkle tree for future use.
Updated on: 2023-06-11T02:16:51.852383+00:00