Segwit is live on Supload
We’re excited to announce native Segwit withdraws are available today from Supload. With the release of Bitcoin core 0.16 last week, we are able to pass the savings in transactions fees that Segwit provides to our users. Also, quicker confirmation times for the payment transaction.
What is segwit?
Segregated witness was a upgrade to the bitcoin blockchains that miners activated in August of 2017. Support for this technology is now dependent on the wallet manufacturers to change their codebase to support it.
Segwit removes the signature data in a Bitcoin transaction. This greatly reduces the amount of data needed in a Bitcoin tx, making the miner fee for the transaction around, from what we’re seeing, 35% cheaper on average. This reduction in tx size also effectively makes the Bitcoin blocksize larger. If every transaction in a block were to utilize Segwit, the blocksize would be closer to 1.8MB, opposed to the 1MB limit without Segwit. This will hopefully reduce the Bitcoin network congestion in the near future.
How to take advantage
Segwit on supload today requires the receiving address to be of type Bech32. A new bitcoin address format that was invented by the Segwit creators. Bech32 addresses are easily distinguishable by starting with the letters “bc1”
bc1qh8tmeke87pr0fcpwkp6mw7fzalup0m6xdp59jh
Currently only a handful of bitcoin wallet manufacturers have adopted the new Bech32 address style. But adoption is expected to spread to all manufacturers soon.
Currently, the software wallets with Bech32 and Segwit support are
A few hardware wallet manufacturers have also already added in support
Why we’re excited about Segwit
Besides the reduced fees in transactions, smaller transaction size making the current Bitcoin blocksize larger, and faster transaction times, it fixes a long standing bug in Bitcoin called transaction malleability. With this bug fixed, it’s going to allow a secondary layer on top of the Bitcoin blockchain called the lightning network.
The lightning network is a developmental technology that we’re very excited about here at Supload. We have a lot of plans as to how we’re going to implement lightning into our service. Lightning will allow almost realtime bitcoin transactions for almost zero fee. Imagine being able to send fractions of a penny. We’re hoping to be able to utilize this evolving technology in our payment methods for our users in the future.
