Author: Matt Corallo 2016-02-08 19:26:48
Published on: 2016-02-08T19:26:48+00:00
The Bitcoin community has been consumed by a scaling debate for the past six months, with two distinct camps offering solutions for increasing on-blockchain transactions. However, the entire community has now unified around one vision: roughly 2MB of transactions per block via Segregated Witness or via a hard fork. The majority of the community agrees that segregated witness should be implemented in the near future and that hard forks will be a necessity at some point. Companies are worried about their ability to move Bitcoins, and investors are losing confidence due to the ongoing strife. To address these concerns, the technical community needs to select the most technically-sound way to achieve the vision of 2MB of transactions per block and work towards a safe hard fork. This requires the community to reset, forgive past aggressions and return the technical debates to technical forums. A hard fork should look like in the context of segwit and this discussion is kicked off with a specific proposal. The proposed outline includes changing the segregated witness discount from 75% to 50%, limiting scriptPubKeys to 100 bytes in size, and restricting scriptSigs to be push-only with transactions limited to contain up to 20 non-segwit inputs. Additionally, the proposal would allow Bitcoin mining hardware to reduce the required logic by allowing the first four bytes of the previous block hash field to contain any value. The author believes that continuing to work towards SegWit as a 2MB-ish soft-fork in the short term with some plans on what a hard fork should look like if broad consensus can be achieved is essential to resolving much of the contention seen in the community.
Updated on: 2023-05-19T23:08:23.069421+00:00