Author: Anthony Towns 2016-02-07 15:25:40
Published on: 2016-02-07T15:25:40+00:00
The author discusses the potential impact of implementing segregated witness on hardforking blocksize increases in Bitcoin. They suggest that if segwit is successful, a hardfork may need to trade off an increase in blocksize with a decrease in the witness discount, and without segwit, alternative changes would be needed to prevent hashing large amounts of data when checking signatures or reducing worst-case UTXO growth. The author does not believe that fees will rise significantly or that there will be a "fee event" due to spam attacks, but suggests having a backup plan in case of major issues with segwit. They propose that Gavin's BIP, which includes an increase to ~2MB coupled with accurate counting and limiting of sighash bytes, could be a good technical backup plan if segwit proves too difficult to deploy safely. However, they acknowledge that this may not be acceptable politically and offer suggestions for making it workable, including a higher level of supermajority and a longer voting period. They emphasize that these are just hobbyist suggestions and do not have any backchannel contacts in mining or bitcoin startups.
Updated on: 2023-05-19T23:07:58.954679+00:00