Author: Jeff Garzik 2015-12-17 18:27:13
Published on: 2015-12-17T18:27:13+00:00
In an email dated December 16, 2015, Jeff Garzik discussed the economic implications of Segregated Witness (SW) deployment. He explained that SW presents a blended price and basket of two goods, with explicit incentives to shift actors from solely using one resource to using both. If deployed via soft fork, the count of nodes that validate witness data is significantly lower than the count of nodes that validate non-witness data, eroding trustless validation of older nodes over time. This results in a "pay more for higher security in core block, pay less for lower security in witness" dynamic. However, if deployed via hard fork, this economic distinction is not present.
Updated on: 2023-06-11T02:15:15.898447+00:00