Understanding Segregated Witness

Segregated Witness (SegWit, for short) is scheduled to “lock in” within 24 hours and activate in about two weeks. Not everyone understands what this Bitcoin protocol upgrade actually does, so in this article, I seek to explain to a general audience what Segwit is.

Segregated Witness and aligning economic incentives with resource costs

Bitcoin mining nodes and full nodes incur costs for the resources used to support the bitcoin network and the blockchain. As the scale of bitcoin increases, so does the cost of resources (CPU, network…

User Activated Soft Forks: the BIP 148 alternative

The following is borrowed from UASF.co with permission

What is a UASF?

UASF stands for User Activated Soft Fork. It’s a mechanism where the activation time of a soft fork occurs on…

Why Segregated Witness will make 2017 Bitcoin’s best year yet

Segregated Witness is an outstanding scientific and logistical achievement which opens the door to exciting innovations that early Bitcoin adopters could only dream of. Most of all, it fixes Bitcoin’s main technical flaw…

SegWit: The Swiftest Safe Path Forward

I and many of my colleagues at BitGo and across the Bitcoin ecosystem are eager to see Segregated Witness activated.

I can vividly remember the day when I shared a room in Hong Kong with many of my fellow developers and we watched…

Why a discount factor of 4? Why not 2 or 8?

Making the discount too large would lead people to use the witness space to store general purpose data on the block chain, or adversarial miners may fill excess space with random junk to defeat fast relay schemes that rely on similar mempools

Is SegWit a block size increase?

Yes! Segregated witness replaces the block size limit with a new block weight limit, counting each byte of witness data as 1 unit of weight and UTXO transaction data as 4 units; as a result, the maximum size of a block becomes just under 4 MB.

Lightning Channels — Segwit Inside

Individual payment channels composed as a series of interconnected links are what make the…