Blockchain

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…

Lightning Channels — Segwit Inside

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

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…

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…

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…

Some developers have referred to this as an ugly hack, is it accurate?

It was originally thought that segregated witness could only be added to Bitcoin using a hard fork. For that reason, it was considered unlikely to be possible to add to Bitcoin in the near term because hard…

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.

I heard SegWit was rushed to avoid a hard fork, is that true?

The idea around segregated witness has been in development for nearly two years, and variants of segregated witness have been in production and network testing for over a year. The current soft fork implement is, by all…