Hey guys, today we have a special announcement to make. Paytomat Wallet added support of Segwit addresses for Bitcoin. We believe this feature is a very important one for the long-term transactions’ compatibility across all wallets on the Bitcoin network. Despite the fact that Segwit was released in 2017, it wasn’t our main priority to make an update due to the lack of usage by other wallets.
In any case, starting from v 1.24.0 you can migrate your Bitcoin addresses to Segwit version which basically means you’ll be using a different address format (starting with 3 instead of 1).
The term Segwit is quite known in the blockchain space, however, it can be quite a challenge to understand its meaning in plain language. We hope this short piece will help you with that.
In simple words, Segwit (aka Segregated Witness) is a software upgrade that fixes several major issues in Bitcoin, as well as allows to fit more transactions within the same block size.
There are dozens of articles on how this technology works so there’s no point to repeat the same info here. Instead, we would like to share why it is important for you to migrate to Segwit and what does it mean for Bitcoin.
To answer these questions, you need to understand that Bitcoin has a limited capacity, meaning the number of transactions it can handle per second. At the moment, it’s about 7–10 transactions that the network can deal with. Apparently, this is not enough to compete with existing payment systems, like Paypal, Venmo, etc.
Despite this, Segwit does allow to handle more transactions because of the way the info is structured now. As you know, each block contains signature that essentially creates an immutable stamp that cannot be changed. Unfortunately, this data consumes a large portion of block’s size (~65%), which is why the job of Segwit is to remove it into a separate storage (extended block). This approach generates lighter blocks and frees up more space, therefore more transactions can be added to the block without even changing its size.
Thus, the primary reason for anyone to start using Segwit is to improve the performance of Bitcoin and make it safer due to malleability fix this update introduces. You can make a migration in the Bitcoin tab of Paytomay Wallet by clicking on migrate, it’s that simple.
If you have any questions or technical difficulties, let us know in our community group.
