bitcoin_segwit_status

Segwit Status Report – Here Are 10+ Lightning Network-Style Apps in Use Right Now

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Remembering Satoshi’s Vision — As it Was Written. Satoshi Nakamoto left the community in 2010, and no one has heard from the anonymous creator of bitcoin ever since. At the moment the bitcoin community has split into two factions due to the scaling debate, that coincidently started the same year Satoshi left… read more.

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yeah.. How will exchanges listing those coins will face this problem? By delisting them?

For those who don't know. Nano is a non mineable cryptocurrency, so it isn't vulnerable to the exact.

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Segregated Witness Benefits

The Segregated Witness soft-fork (segwit) includes a wide range of features, many of which are highly technical. This page summarises some of the benefits of those features.

Malleability Fixes

Bitcoin transactions are identified by a 64-digit hexadecimal hash called a transaction identifier (txid) which is based on both the coins being spent and on who will be able to spend the results of the transaction.

Unfortunately, the way the txid is calculated allows anyone to make small modifications to the transaction that will not change its meaning, but will change the txid. This is called third-party malleability. BIP 62 (“dealing with malleability”) attempted to address these issues in a piecemeal manner, but was too complicated to implement as consensus checks and has been withdrawn.

For example, you could submit a transaction with txid ef74…c309 to the network, but instead find that a third-party, such as a node on the network relaying your transaction, or the miner who includes your transaction in a block, modifies the transaction slightly, resulting in your transaction still spending the same coins and paying the same addresses, but being confirmed under the completely different txid 683f…8bfa instead.

More generally, if one or more of the signers of the transaction revise their signatures then the transaction remains valid and pays the same amounts to the same addresses, but the txid changes completely because it incorporates the signatures. The general case of changes to signature data (but not the outputs or choice of inputs) modifying the transaction is called scriptSig malleability.

Segwit prevents third-party and scriptSig malleability by allowing Bitcoin users to move the malleable parts of the transaction into the transaction witness, and segregating that witness so that changes to the witness does not affect calculation of the txid.

Who benefits?

Wallet authors tracking spent bitcoins: it’s easiest to monitor the status of your own outgoing transactions by simply looking them up by txid. But in a system with third-party malleability, wallets must implement extra code to be able to deal with changed txids.

Anyone spending unconfirmed transactions: if Alice pays Bob in transaction 1, Bob uses that payment to pay Charlie in transaction 2, and then Alice’s payment gets malleated and confirmed with a different txid, then transaction 2 is now invalid and Charlie has not been paid. If Bob is trustworthy, he will reissue the payment to Charlie; but if he isn’t, he can simply keep those bitcoins for himself.

The Lightning Network: with third-party and scriptSig malleability fixed, the Lightning Network is less complicated to implement and significantly more efficient in its use of space on the blockchain. With scriptSig malleability removed, it also becomes possible to run lightweight Lightning clients that outsource monitoring the blockchain, instead of each Lightning client needing to also be a full Bitcoin node.

Anyone using the block chain: smart contracts today, such as micropayment channels, and anticipated new smart contracts, become less complicated to design, understand, and monitor.

Note: segwit transactions only avoid malleability if all their inputs are segwit spends (either directly, or via a backwards compatible segwit P2SH address).

Further information

Linear scaling of sighash operations

A major problem with simple approaches to increasing the Bitcoin blocksize is that for certain transactions, signature-hashing scales quadratically rather than linearly.

In essence, doubling the size of a transaction can double both the number of signature operations, and the amount of data that has to be hashed for each of those signatures to be verified. This has been seen in the wild, where an individual block required 25 seconds to validate, and maliciously designed transactions could take over 3 minutes.

Segwit resolves this by changing the calculation of the transaction hash for signatures so that each byte of a transaction only needs to be hashed at most twice. This provides the same functionality more efficiently, so that large transactions can still be generated without running into problems due to signature hashing, even if they are generated maliciously or much larger blocks (and therefore larger transactions) are supported.

Who benefits?

Removing the quadratic scaling of hashed data for verifying signatures makes increasing the block size safer. Doing that without also limiting transaction sizes allows Bitcoin to continue to support payments that go to or come from large groups, such as payments of mining rewards or crowdfunding services.

The modified hash only applies to signature operations initiated from witness data, so signature operations from the base block will continue to require lower limits.

Further information

Signing of input values

When a hardware wallet signs a transaction, it can easily verify the total amount being spent, but can only safely determine the fee by having a full copy of all the input transactions being spent, and must hash each of those to ensure it is not being fed false data. Since individual transactions can be up to 1MB in size, this is not necessarily a cheap operation, even if the transaction being signed is itself quite small.

Segwit resolves this by explicitly hashing the input value. This means that a hardware wallet can simply be given the transaction hash, index, and value (and told what public key was used), and can safely sign the spending transaction, no matter how large or complicated the transaction being spent was.

Who benefits?

Manufacturers and users of hardware wallets are the obvious beneficiaries; however this likely also makes it much easier to safely use Bitcoin in small embedded devices for “Internet of things” applications.

This benefit is only available when spending transactions sent to segwit enabled addresses (or segwit-via-P2SH addresses).

Further information

Increased security for multisig via pay-to-script-hash (P2SH)

Multisig payments currently use P2SH which is secured by the 160-bit HASH160 algorithm (RIPEMD of SHA256). However, if one of the signers wishes to steal all the funds, they can find a collision between a valid address as part of a multisig script and a script that simply pays them all the funds with only 80-bits (2 80 ) worth of work, which is already within the realm of possibility for an extremely well-resourced attacker. (For comparison, at a sustained 1 exahash/second, the Bitcoin mining network does 80-bits worth of work every two weeks)

Segwit resolves this by using HASH160 only for payments direct to a single public key (where this sort of attack is useless), while using 256-bit SHA256 hashes for payments to a script hash.

Who benefits?

Everyone paying to multisig or smart contracts via segwit benefits from the extra security provided for scripts.

Further information

Script versioning

Changes to Bitcoin’s script allow for both improved security and improved functionality. However, the design of script only allows backwards-compatible (soft-forking) changes to be implemented by replacing one of the ten extra OP_NOP opcodes with a new opcode that can conditionally fail the script, but which otherwise does nothing. This is sufficient for many changes – such as introducing a new signature method or a feature like OP_CLTV, but it is both slightly hacky (for example, OP_CLTV usually has to be accompanied by an OP_DROP) and cannot be used to enable even features as simple as joining two strings.

Segwit resolves this by including a version number for scripts, so that additional opcodes that would have required a hard-fork to be used in non-segwit transactions can instead be supported by simply increasing the script version.

Who benefits?

Easier changes to script opcodes will make advanced scripting in Bitcoin easier. This includes changes such as introducing Schnorr signatures, using key recovery to shrink signature sizes, supporting sidechains, or creating even smarter contracts by using Merklized Abstract Syntax Trees (MAST) and other research-level ideas.

Reducing UTXO growth

The Unspent Transaction Output (UTXO) database is maintained by each validating Bitcoin node in order to determine whether new transactions are valid or fraudulent. For efficient operation of the network, this database needs to be very quick to query and modify, and should ideally be able to fit in main memory (RAM), so keeping the database’s size in bytes as small as possible is valuable.

This becomes more difficult as Bitcoin grows, as each new user must have at least one UTXO entry of their own and will prefer having multiple entries to help improve their privacy and flexibility, or to provide as backing for payment channels or other smart contracts.

Segwit improves the situation here by making signature data, which does not impact the UTXO set size, cost 75% less than data that does impact the UTXO set size. This is expected to encourage users to favour the use of transactions that minimise impact on the UTXO set in order to minimise fees, and to encourage developers to design smart contracts and new features in a way that will also minimise the impact on the UTXO set.

Because segwit is a soft-forking change and does not increase the base blocksize, the worst case growth rate of the UTXO set stays the same.

Who benefits?

Reduced UTXO growth will benefit miners, businesses, and users who run full nodes, which in turn helps maintain the current security of the Bitcoin network as more users enter the system. Users and developers who help minimise the growth of the UTXO set will benefit from lower fees compared to those who ignore the impact of their transactions on UTXO growth.

Further information

Efficiency gains when not verifying signatures

Signatures for historical transactions may be less interesting than signatures for future transactions – for example, Bitcoin Core does not check signatures for transactions prior to the most recent checkpoint by default, and some SPV clients simply don’t check signatures themselves at all, trusting that has already been done by miners or other nodes. At present, however, signature data is an integral part of the transaction and must be present in order to calculate the transaction hash.

Segregating the signature data allows nodes that aren’t interested in signature data to prune it from the disk, or to avoid downloading it in the first place, saving resources.

Who benefits?

As more transactions use segwit addresses, people running pruned or SPV nodes will be able to operate with less bandwidth and disk space.

Block capacity/size increase

Since old nodes will only download the witness-stripped block, they only enforce the 1 MB block size limit rule on that data. New nodes, which understand the full block with witness data, are therefore free to replace this limit with a new one, allowing for larger block sizes. Segregated witness therefore takes advantage of this opportunity to raise the block size limit to nearly 4 MB, and adds a new cost limit to ensure blocks remain balanced in their resource use (this effectively results in an effective limit closer to 1.6 to 2 MB).

Who benefits?

People who run upgraded wallets will be able to take advantage of the increased block size by moving signatures to the witness section of the transaction.

Moving towards a single combined block limit

Currently there are two consensus-enforced limits on blocksize: the block can be no larger than 1MB and, independently, there can be no more than 20,000 signature checks performed across the transactions in the block.

Finding the most profitable set of transactions to include in a block given a single limit is an instance of the knapsack problem, which can be easily solved almost perfectly with a simple greedy algorithm. However adding the second constraint makes finding a good solution very hard in some cases, and this theoretical problem has been exploited in practice to force blocks to be mined at a size well below capacity.

It is not possible to solve this problem without either a hardfork, or substantially decreasing the block size. Since segwit can’t fix the problem, it settles on not making it worse: in particular, rather than introducing an independent limit for the segregated witness data, instead a single limit is applied to the weighted sum of the UTXO data and the witness data, allowing both to be limited simultaneously as a combined entity.

Who benefits?

Ultimately miners will benefit if a future hardfork that changes the block capacity limit to be a single weighted sum of parameters. For example:

This lets miners easily and accurately fill blocks while maximising fee income, and that will benefit users by allowing them to more reliably calculate the appropriate fee needed for their transaction to be mined.

Further information

Update 2016-10-19

Earlier versions of this page listed “Compact fraud proofs” as a benefit of segwit. However, as implemented, segwit does not make this any easier: with or without segwit, a future soft-fork enabling compact fraud proofs and the benefits they bring, will need to include its own commitment (eg, in the coinbase transaction), rather than being able to extend the commitment data used by segwit.

The previous text was:

Compact fraud proofs

As the Bitcoin userbase expands, validating the entire blockchain naturally becomes more expensive. To maintain the decentralised, trustless nature of Bitcoin, it is important to allow those who cannot afford to validate the entire blockchain to at least be able to cheaply validate as much of it as they can afford.

Segwit improves the situation here by allowing a future soft-fork to extend the witness structure to include commitment data, which will allow lightweight (SPV) clients to enforce consensus rules such such as the number of bitcoins introduced in a block, the size of a block, and the number of sigops used in a block.

Who benefits?

Fraud proofs allow SPV users to help enforce Bitcoin’s consensus rules, which will potentially greatly increase the security of the Bitcoin network as a whole, as well as reduce the ways in which individual users can be attacked.

These fraud proofs can be added to the witness data structure as part of a future soft-fork, and they’ll help SPV clients enforce the rules even on transactions that don’t make use of the segwit features.

Segregated Witness Benefits was published on January 26, 2016 .

US Search Mobile Web

Welcome to the Yahoo Search forum! We’d love to hear your ideas on how to improve Yahoo Search.

The Yahoo product feedback forum now requires a valid Yahoo ID and password to participate.

You are now required to sign-in using your Yahoo email account in order to provide us with feedback and to submit votes and comments to existing ideas. If you do not have a Yahoo ID or the password to your Yahoo ID, please sign-up for a new account.

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Improve your services

Your search engine does not find any satisfactory results for searches. It is too weak. Also, the server of bing is often off

I created a yahoo/email account long ago but I lost access to it; can y'all delete all my yahoo/yahoo account except for my newest YaAccount

I want all my lost access yahoo account 'delete'; Requesting supporter for these old account deletion; 'except' my Newest yahoo account this Account don't delete! Because I don't want it interfering my online 'gamble' /games/business/data/ Activity , because the computer/security program might 'scure' my Information and detect theres other account; then secure online activities/ business securing from my suspicion because of my other account existing will make the security program be 'Suspicious' until I'm 'secure'; and if I'm gambling online 'Depositing' then I need those account 'delete' because the insecurity 'Suspicioun' will program the casino game 'Programs' securities' to be 'secure' then it'll be 'unfair' gaming and I'll lose because of the insecurity can be a 'Excuse'. Hope y'all understand my explanation!

I want all my lost access yahoo account 'delete'; Requesting supporter for these old account deletion; 'except' my Newest yahoo account this Account don't delete! Because I don't want it interfering my online 'gamble' /games/business/data/ Activity , because the computer/security program might 'scure' my Information and detect theres other account; then secure online activities/ business securing from my suspicion because of my other account existing will make the security program be 'Suspicious' until I'm 'secure'; and if I'm gambling online 'Depositing' then I need those account 'delete' because the insecurity 'Suspicioun' will program the casino game 'Programs' securities' to be… more

chithidio@Yahoo.com

i dont know what happened but i can not search anything.

Golf handicap tracker, why can't I get to it?

Why do I get redirected on pc and mobile device?

Rahyaftco@yahoo.com

RYAN RAHSAD BELL literally means

Question on a link

In the search for Anaïs Nin, one of the first few links shows a picture of a man. Why? Since Nin is a woman, I can’t figure out why. Can you show some reason for this? Who is he? If you click on the picture a group of pictures of Nin and no mention of that man. Is it an error?

Repair the Yahoo Search App.

Yahoo Search App from the Google Play Store on my Samsung Galaxy S8+ phone stopped working on May 18, 2018.

I went to the Yahoo Troubleshooting page but the article that said to do a certain 8 steps to fix the problem with Yahoo Services not working and how to fix the problem. Of course they didn't work.

I contacted Samsung thru their Samsung Tutor app on my phone. I gave their Technican access to my phone to see if there was a problem with my phone that stopped the Yahoo Search App from working. He went to Yahoo and I signed in so he could try to fix the Yahoo Search App not working. He also used another phone, installed the app from the Google Play Store to see if the app would do any kind of search thru the app. The Yahoo Search App just wasn't working.

I also had At&t try to help me because I have UVERSE for my internet service. My internet was working perfectly. Their Technical Support team member checked the Yahoo Search App and it wouldn't work for him either.

We can go to www.yahoo.com and search for any topic or website. It's just the Yahoo Search App that won't allow anyone to do web searches at all.

I let Google know that the Yahoo Search App installed from their Google Play Store had completely stopped working on May 18, 2018.

I told them that Yahoo has made sure that their Yahoo members can't contact them about anything.

I noticed that right after I accepted the agreement that said Oath had joined with Verizon I started having the problem with the Yahoo Search App.
No matter what I search for or website thru the Yahoo Search App it says the following after I searched for
www.att.com.

WEBPAGE NOT AVAILABLE
This webpage at gttp://r.search.yahoo.com/_ylt=A0geJGq8BbkrgALEMMITE5jylu=X3oDMTEzcTjdWsyBGNvbG8DYmyxBHBvcwMxBHZ0aWQDTkFQUEMwxzEEc2VjA3NylRo=10/Ru=https%3a%2f%2fwww.att.att.com%2f/Rk=2/Es=plkGNRAB61_XKqFjTEN7J8cXA-
could not be loaded because:
net::ERR_CLEARTEXT_NOT_PERMITTED

I tried to search for things like www.homedepot.com. The same thing happened. It would say WEBPAGE NOT AVAILABLE. The only thing that changed were all the upper and lower case letters, numbers and symbols.
Then it would again say
could not be loaded because:
net::ERR_CLEARTEXT_NOT_PERMITTED

This is the same thing that happened when Samsung and At&t tried to do any kind of searches thru the Yahoo Search App.

Yahoo needs to fix the problem with their app.

Yahoo Search App from the Google Play Store on my Samsung Galaxy S8+ phone stopped working on May 18, 2018.

I went to the Yahoo Troubleshooting page but the article that said to do a certain 8 steps to fix the problem with Yahoo Services not working and how to fix the problem. Of course they didn't work.

I contacted Samsung thru their Samsung Tutor app on my phone. I gave their Technican access to my phone to see if there was a problem with my phone that stopped the Yahoo Search App from working. He went to Yahoo and… more

My Vision For SegWit And Lightning Networks On Litecoin And Bitcoin

You’ve probably seen that I recently started advocating for SegWit to activate on Litecoin and Bitcoin. I wasn’t doing any of this before because it would be wasted energy when the code was not finished. But now that the release candidate code is tagged and binaries close to release, I figure it’s time for me to start making some noise.

So you may wonder why I’m pushing for SegWit. Litecoin does not have a block size problem. That’s right, and SegWit is not just a block scaling solution. I would even say block scaling is just a side benefit of SegWit. The main fix is transaction malleability, which would allow Lightning Networks (LN) to be built on top of Litecoin. And there are a bunch more nice features of SegWit.

But some people say LN on Bitcoin will kill any reason to use Litecoin. If people can do instantaneous transactions on Bitcoin, why would they use Litecoin? My gut feel is that this is not the case. Even with LN, Bitcoin still cannot service every person in the world. I think the calculation was that at 1MB blocks, LN and SegWit on Bitcoin can service 500M users. LN nodes will charge a fee for LN txns going through them and that fee will be relative to the Bitcoin network fee. So Bitcoin LN txns will be more expensive than Litecoin LN txns. It may make economic sense for a LN txn to go via Litecoin and back to Bitcoin to get the cheapest rate. Lightning makes this possible because it allows the two LN to be interoperable. I don’t know that this use case will be economical or not, but we won’t know until both LNs are built and running.

Think of it being two highways: Today, Bitcoin is packed full of cars and Litecoin is empty. Even with Bitcoin packed, the cars are not coming to use the Litecoin highway today because it’s not connected and it’s inconvenient (centralized exchanges and slow on-chain transfers) to go across. LN will build bridges over the highways. But a side benefit is that these bridges will connect both highways together. Maybe the bridges on Bitcoin are enough such that cars will still stay on the Bitcoin highway. My bet is that the convenience and the cheaper tolls on Litecoin highway will convince cars to cross over and use Litecoin. But we won’t know until both are built.

Another benefit is atomic cross-chain transactions via LN. Two users can trade BTC and LTC instantaneous and without risk. Efficient decentralized exchanges are now possible. Or what if a merchant accepts only BTC but you only have LTC. You can now pay LTC and exchange them instantly through a LN exchange node and send BTC to the merchant. That’s basically decentralized ShapeShift. One last thing I thought of recently is the ability to balance lopsided payment channels on both lightning networks. There are probably millions of other cool things that SegWit and LN open up that we have yet scratched the surface of.

Until SegWit, LN, and Confidential Transactions, I didn’t see a need for Litecoin to come out to help test features before they are on Bitcoin. So I was happy to let Litecoin go on without a lot of development. Hence my tweet about Litecoin not needing development. But with SegWit and Bitcoin’s current block scaling deadlock, I see a potential for Litecoin to help Bitcoin break through this deadlock. Litecoin can take a lead and be a positive force in the cryptocurrency space. We have been drafting behind the Bitcoin race car for many years. It’s about time to take a turn out front.

This is my vision for how Litecoin and Bitcoin will work together to solve the world’s transaction needs in the future. And it is why the Silver to Bitcoin’s Gold analogy always resonated with me. Do you want to come along for the ride?

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SegWit Wallet Support is Coming to Bitcoin Core

A new pull request will likely see SegWit included in the forthcoming Bitcoin Core version 0.16 release, easing Core node access to the technology.

‘It’s Happening’

Activity from Core’s Github repository confirms the pull request by Core developer Pieter Wuille, which comes as industry and community pressure builds on Bitcoin entities to upgrade systems to handle SegWit.

According to a previous release schedule , 0.16.0 is due to complete by May 1, and could now count a block size resolution milestone among its improvements for the Bitcoin network.

“Prepare for liftoff as the real BTC solves it with 1MB base block data, jaws will drop,” one example of the excited social media responses to the news reads.

Merged PR from sipa: SegWit wallet support https://t.co/J6lwf8uo9O

— Bitcoin Merges (@BitcoinMerges) January 11, 2018

Curator Jonas Schnelli accompanied the news with a selection of Bitcoin Core statistics for 2017, which included almost 1,200 merged pull requests, along with 3,277 commits from 713 contributors.

Bitcoin Companies Face New Pressure To Step Up

Amid ongoing high transaction costs for non-SegWit transactions, Bitcoin users have stepped up efforts to force industry businesses to implement compatibility as a priority. Despite its availability, many well-known Bitcoin businesses have sidelined SegWit in favor of rolling out other features.

This week, it was US exchange and wallet provider Coinbase which bore the brunt of the movement, with a dedicated petition asking for SegWit now gaining almost 7500 signatures.

The exchange had announced SegWit was third in its list of engineering priorities late last year, already an improvement on previous comments from CEO Brian Armstrong who suggested users were uninterested in seeing the upgrade.

Some other major exchanges already support SegWit, these including Bitstamp, Japan’s new US-focussed platform BitFlyerUSA and now p2p trading directory Localbitcoins .

Hinting at its utility as a Coinbase alternative for “angry” users, journalist Kyle Torpey highlighted BitFlyerUSA’s forthcoming simplified trading tools.

For #Bitcoin people who are angry at @coinbase, it seems @bitFlyerUSA will soon offer a simple buy/sell interface for newcomers. They've already implemented #SegWit. https://t.co/dDHvw2osYZ

As the proportion of SegWit transactions remains at around 11% of the total , any opportunity for expansion is hotly awaited by Bitcoin proponents looking to see it preserve its status as the go-to cryptocurrency.

Executives at both Ripple and Bitcoin Cash have touted their altcoins’ reduced usage costs as a reason to invest in them instead of Bitcoin.

What do you think about the SegWit release schedule for Bitcoin? Let us know in the comments below!

Images courtesy of Twitter, Shutterstock

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The Arrival of SegWit: Bitcoin’s Saving Grace?

SegWit (segregated witness) Bitcoin transactions are at an all-time high, and Bitcoin transaction fees are the lowest they have been in months. What factors contributed to this sudden change?

For new users of Bitcoin, SegWit may seem like a meaningless buzzword that does not hold any value. But, for those aware of what it is, it means so much more. SegWit is a relatively new improvement to the current Bitcoin network that hopes to solve or at least temporarily fix the cryptocurrency’s transaction fee and scaling problems.

SegWit is a soft fork change which is not intrusive or destructive for the Bitcoin network. SegWit decreases the byte size of virtual currency transactions, which helps to decrease transaction fees by a substantial amount. All of this is achieved while still increasing the transaction capacity of the network. This is undoubtedly an important scaling solution for Bitcoin.

Dan Romero, Coinbase’s Vice President said:

SegWit is an important step in scaling the Bitcoin network. We are continuing to invest in our Bitcoin infrastructure and we will be working on implementing additional Bitcoin scalability improvements like transaction batching and improved UTXO management.

SegWit Adoption

Bitcoin fees were all the talk just one month ago. The whole crypto community and some media companies were talking about the exponential increase in the virtual currency’s fees that was seen over the course of 2017. This was evidently not the best coverage that the cryptocurrency could have received, and this media onslaught was not helpful in boosting the worldwide sentiment for Bitcoin.

But now, this is beginning to change and turn for the better. More and more Bitcoin service providers have begun running SegWit addresses. What does this mean for the end consumer?

This increase in SegWit-integrated addresses has allowed for a large decrease in the fees for transactions. This large decrease, often ranging in the high 30-40 percentiles off normal transaction prices, is giving users a bit more peace of mind when sending the cryptocurrency around.

Over 30% of all Bitcoin transactions today are being pushed using the SegWit protocol. To give this a bit of context, exactly one month ago, only 15% of all transactions utilized SegWit. This amount of adoption by consumers and Bitcoin service providers has been unprecedented, with the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchanges, such as GDAX/Coinbase and Bitfinex, implementing SegWit into their exchange transaction services.

In a direct result to this, Bitfinex has dropped Bitcoin withdrawal fees by 25% and GDAX/Coinbase’s transfer fees have been decreased drastically. Additionally, Binance and Kraken, two other large exchanges, followed suit with large fee decreases to follow this trend. This is just the start of SegWit adoption in the Bitcoin space. SegWit use is set to be adopted by many other exchanges and Bitcoin service providers in the near future.

It is evident to see that Bitcoin, with all its upcoming improvements, has a promising future. High cost and unsustainable fees are, hopefully, a thing of the past. With the arrival of promising new technologies and changes to the Bitcoin blockchain, you should never have to deal with $50 transaction fees ever again.

What do you think the use of Bitcoin as a daily driver coin? Will scaling problems for Bitcoin be solved in the future?

Capacity increases FAQ

What is the roadmap?

Capacity increases for the Bitcoin system, written by Gregory Maxwell and published 7 Dec 2015 to the bitcoin-dev mailing list. A statement supporting the roadmap has been signed by developers who (according to GitHub) generated more than 90% of all commits to Bitcoin Core in 2015.

What specific technologies are included in the roadmap, and when can we expect them?

New technology will be deployed when it is ready and has been tested. However, we believe the following is a reasonable schedule for the specific improvements described in the roadmap.

* Dates with an asterisk are when we expect to release soft fork-ready code. The code will not be released until it has been well reviewed, and the actual fork will take time to activate (BIP66 activated in July 2015 after a few months; BIP65 activated in Dec 2015 after only 5 weeks).

Segregated witness testnet: a separate testnet (not part of the regular testnet) that provides an opportunity for Bitcoin Core contributors to test segregated witness and for wallet authors to begin working with it.

Libsecp256k1 verification: 500% to 700% speed boost on x86_64 hardware during verification to help new full nodes join the network and to lighten the burden on existing nodes.

OP_CHECKSEQUENCEVERIFY: 25,000% improvement in bi-directional payment channel efficiency by allowing users to keep channels open as long as they want.

VersionBits: increase the maximum number of soft forks able to be deployed simultaneously from 1 to 29, allowing for faster and more decentralized future upgrades of the network.

Segregated witness: 175% to 400% direct capacity upgrade, 66% additional improvement in bi-directional channel efficiency by consolidating channel open and close operations, an end to third-party malleability that hurts smart contract deployment, fraud proofs to allow lightweight clients to better participate in economic enforcement, and ability to more easily upgrade Bitcoin’s Script language so that new and more powerful trustless contracts may be devised.

IBLTs and weak blocks: 90% or more reduction in critical bandwidth to relay blocks created by miners who want their blocks to propagate quickly with a modest increase in total bandwidth, bringing many of the benefits of the Bitcoin Relay Network to all full nodes. This improvement is accomplished by spreading bandwidth usage out over time for full nodes, which means IBLT and weak blocks may allow for safer future increases to the max block size.

Is the segregated witness soft fork equivalent to a 4MB block size increase, a 2MB increase, a 1.75MB increase, or what? I keep hearing different numbers.

The current proposal for soft fork segregated witness (segwit) counts each byte in a witness as 0.25 bytes towards the maximum block size limit, meaning the maximum size of a block is just under 4MB.

However, blocks are not expected to consist entirely of witness data and each non-witness byte is counted as 1.00 bytes towards the maximum block size limit, so blocks near 4MB in size would be unlikely.

According to some calculations performed by Anthony Towns, a block filled with standard single-signature P2PKH transactions would be about 1.6MB and a block filled with 2-of-2 multisignature transactions would be about 2.0MB.

Segregated witness sounds complicated; will the ecosystem be prepared for its deployment?

Some ideas are easy to explain but hard to execute. Other ideas are easy to execute but hard to explain. Segregated witness (segwit) seems to be the latter.

Segwit can be deployed incrementally without breaking compatibility, so no significant preparation of the ecosystem is necessary. Developers who want immediate hands-on experience with segwit can begin to test their software on the segwit testnet being deployed in Dec 2015.

Initially, only miners who wish to support it need to upgrade in order to activate it and enforce it on the mainnet. Existing applications only need to change if they wish to take advantage of the new features.

Segregated witness transactions will require lower fees, will afford much greater performance optimizations, and can support multistage smart contracts and protocols such as bi-directional payment channels that can scale without writing extra data to the blockchain. Wallets are strongly encouraged to upgrade but can continue to operate without modification as the deployment does not break backwards compatibility.

Segregated witness still sounds complicated. Why not simply raise the maximum block size?

There’s a single line of code in Bitcoin Core that says the maximum block size is 1,000,000 bytes (1MB). The simplest change would be a hard fork to update that line to say, for example, 2,000,000 bytes (2MB).

Hard forks are anything but simple:

We don’t have experience: Miners, merchants, developers, and users have never deployed a hard fork, so techniques for safely deploying them have not been tested.

This is unlike soft forks, whose deployments were initially managed by Nakamoto, where we gained experience from the complications in the BIP16 deployment, where we refined our technique in the BIP34 deployment, and where we’ve gained enough experience with BIPs 66 and 65 to begin managing multiple soft forks with BIP9 version bits in the future.

Upgrades required: Hard forks require all full nodes to upgrade or everyone who uses that node may lose money. This includes the node operator, if they use it to protect their wallet, as well as lightweight clients who get their data from the node.

Other changes required: Even a single-line change such as increasing the maximum block size has effects on other parts of the code, some of which are undesirable. For example, right now it’s possible to construct a transaction that takes up almost 1MB of space and which takes 30 seconds or more to validate on a modern computer (blocks containing such transactions have been mined). In 2MB blocks, a 2MB transaction can be constructed that may take over 10 minutes to validate which opens up dangerous denial-of-service attack vectors. Other lines of code would need to be changed to prevent these problems.

Despite these considerable complications, with sufficient precautions, none of them is fatal to a hard fork, and we do expect to make hard forks in the future. But with segregated witness (segwit) we have a soft fork, similar to other soft forks we’ve performed and gained experience in deploying, that provides us with many benefits in addition to allowing more transactions to be added to the blockchain.

Segwit does require more changes in higher level software stacks than a simple block size increase, but if we truly want to see bitcoin scale, far more invasive changes will be needed anyway, and segwit will gently encourage people to upgrade to more scalable models right away without forcing them to do so.

Developers, miners, and the community have accrued significant experience deploying soft forks, and we believe segwit can be deployed at least as fast, and probably more securely, than a hard fork that increases the maximum block size.

Will there be a hard fork before or as part of the segregated witness implementation?

No. That is not part of the roadmap.

If there’s eventually going to be a hard fork, why not do it now?

We currently have the ability to increase the capacity of the system through soft forks that have widespread consensus without any of the complications of a hard fork, as described in an earlier question, so the expectation that there will be an eventual hard fork is not sufficient reason to attempt one now.

In addition to giving us extra transaction capacity, the improvements proposed in the roadmap (combined with other technology such as bi-directional payment channels) give users the ability to reduce the amount of blockchain space they use on average—effectively increasing the capacity of the Bitcoin system without increasing the amount of full node bandwidth used.

BIP68 and BIP112 allow bi-directional payment channels to stay open indefinitely, which we expect to vastly reduce the number of payment channel transactions that need to be committed to the blockchain.

Segregated witness allows a payment channel close transaction to be combined with a payment channel open transaction, reducing the blockchain space used to change channels by about 66%.

Segregated witness allows soft forks to change the Bitcoin Script language in ways that could reduce the average size of a transaction, such as using public-key-recovery-from-signatures or Schnorr combined signatures.

Segregated witness permits the creation of compact fraud proofs that may bring the security of Simplified Payment Verification (SPV) lightweight clients up near to that of full nodes, which may allow the network to function well with fewer full nodes than it can under currently-deployed technology.

The actual effect of these technologies is unknown, but scaling now with a soft fork that has wide consensus allows us to obtain the immediate gains, test and measure the mid-term possibilities, and use that data to formulate long-term plans.

How will segregated witness transactions work for wallets?

Wallets that currently support P2SH can migrate to full segregated witness in two phases:

Phase 1: Scripts are hashed twice, first to 256 bits and then to 160 bits. The 160 bit hash will be compatible with existing P2SH addresses, so upgraded wallets will be able to send and receive bitcoins to and from currently existing wallets.

Phase 2: Scripts are hashed once to 256 bits. This format will not be compatible with existing wallets but will allow more efficient use of block space and will offer better security due to greater collision resistance.

If no one is forced to upgrade, why will anyone bother to upgrade? I heard P2SH took almost two years to become widely deployed.

Each byte of the witness part of a segregated witness (segwit) transaction will only count as 0.25 bytes towards the size of the transaction. Since transaction fees are based on the size of a transaction, this is effectively a 75% discount on fees for that part of a transaction—but only for people who use segwit.

David Harding provided a table of estimated savings at various fee/transaction levels. That is, if the fee for a typical 250-byte transaction is $0.01 USD, using segwit will save about $0.003 when spending a P2PK-in-P2SH transaction output.

Bitcoin Price Forecast: SegWit Sees Unprecedented Adoption as BTC Transactions Spike

Daily Bitcoin News Update

Tracking BTC prices is becoming a mind-numbing process as Bitcoin prices continue to seesaw on the chart. Since price volatility is a given in Bitcoin investing, daily price movements are better left ignored. What’s more deserving of our attention right now is how immaculately Bitcoin is beginning to right itself.

Bitcoin’s glaring imperfections are beginning to recede into the background hours after the new Bitcoin update has taken effect. For reference, Bitcoin’s core code was upgraded this week to fully integrate “SegWit.”

In the last 24 hours, SegWit-based transactions have seen an unprecedented jump. Historically, SegWit constituted an average of 13% to 15% of transaction volume. As of now, SegWit adoption has encroached nearly 30% of transactions—a number never seen before.

At the rate Bitcoiners are espousing this upgrade, we won’t be surprised if we close the week with SegWit-based BTC transactions culminating in excess of 50% of all transactions. (Source: “Transaction percentage,” SegWit Charts, last accessed February 28, 2018.)

In case all this commentary is Chinese for you, the simplistic explanation is that Bitcoin coders have just fine-tuned Bitcoin’s out-of-date technology, which will now allow for swift transaction validations. The technical improvement afforded by SegWit is making the updated Bitcoin a whole lot cheaper and faster than its former slow, expensive, antiquated version.

Take note that the SegWit soft fork was introduced about three years ago but was never implemented as it generated skepticism in the developer community. In fact, disagreements over SegWit adoption ultimately led to the Bitcoin hard fork, which gave us Bitcoin Cash (BCH)—a Bitcoin clone purporting to be the “pure Bitcoin.”

Although part of the developer community remained at odds with SegWit, the majority of the investor community has been on the same page on this issue. Investors have been looking forward to SegWit adoption since forever.

And, as we confirm from Bitcoin’s daily transactions history, investors are, in fact, embracing SegWit with open arms. In the past 24 hours, Bitcoin’s transactions as a percentage of its market cap have soared to 5.78%, close to Litecoin’s 5.96%. (Source: “Bitcoin, Litecoin Sent in USD historical chart,” BitInfoCharts, last accessed February 28, 2018.)

In other words, the unique edge Litecoin enjoyed against Bitcoin as a cheaper and faster digital medium of exchange is slowly being reseized by Bitcoin.

Analyst Take

Bitcoin skeptics have been bashing it for having lost its touch as a digital currency. To them, Bitcoin has no utility except as a store of value. That, too, has been in question because of its price volatility.

But following the SegWit integration, we foresee the mighty Bitcoin gradually reattaining its lost status as a viable digital monetary alternative to fiat currency. The trend bolsters our Bitcoin price forecast for 2018 that sets the BTC price target at $15,000.

My Vision For SegWit And Lightning Networks On Litecoin And Bitcoin

You’ve probably seen that I recently started advocating for SegWit to activate on Litecoin and Bitcoin. I wasn’t doing any of this before because it would be wasted energy when the code was not finished. But now that the release candidate code is tagged and binaries close to release, I figure it’s time for me to start making some noise.

So you may wonder why I’m pushing for SegWit. Litecoin does not have a block size problem. That’s right, and SegWit is not just a block scaling solution. I would even say block scaling is just a side benefit of SegWit. The main fix is transaction malleability, which would allow Lightning Networks (LN) to be built on top of Litecoin. And there are a bunch more nice features of SegWit.

But some people say LN on Bitcoin will kill any reason to use Litecoin. If people can do instantaneous transactions on Bitcoin, why would they use Litecoin? My gut feel is that this is not the case. Even with LN, Bitcoin still cannot service every person in the world. I think the calculation was that at 1MB blocks, LN and SegWit on Bitcoin can service 500M users. LN nodes will charge a fee for LN txns going through them and that fee will be relative to the Bitcoin network fee. So Bitcoin LN txns will be more expensive than Litecoin LN txns. It may make economic sense for a LN txn to go via Litecoin and back to Bitcoin to get the cheapest rate. Lightning makes this possible because it allows the two LN to be interoperable. I don’t know that this use case will be economical or not, but we won’t know until both LNs are built and running.

Think of it being two highways: Today, Bitcoin is packed full of cars and Litecoin is empty. Even with Bitcoin packed, the cars are not coming to use the Litecoin highway today because it’s not connected and it’s inconvenient (centralized exchanges and slow on-chain transfers) to go across. LN will build bridges over the highways. But a side benefit is that these bridges will connect both highways together. Maybe the bridges on Bitcoin are enough such that cars will still stay on the Bitcoin highway. My bet is that the convenience and the cheaper tolls on Litecoin highway will convince cars to cross over and use Litecoin. But we won’t know until both are built.

Another benefit is atomic cross-chain transactions via LN. Two users can trade BTC and LTC instantaneous and without risk. Efficient decentralized exchanges are now possible. Or what if a merchant accepts only BTC but you only have LTC. You can now pay LTC and exchange them instantly through a LN exchange node and send BTC to the merchant. That’s basically decentralized ShapeShift. One last thing I thought of recently is the ability to balance lopsided payment channels on both lightning networks. There are probably millions of other cool things that SegWit and LN open up that we have yet scratched the surface of.

Until SegWit, LN, and Confidential Transactions, I didn’t see a need for Litecoin to come out to help test features before they are on Bitcoin. So I was happy to let Litecoin go on without a lot of development. Hence my tweet about Litecoin not needing development. But with SegWit and Bitcoin’s current block scaling deadlock, I see a potential for Litecoin to help Bitcoin break through this deadlock. Litecoin can take a lead and be a positive force in the cryptocurrency space. We have been drafting behind the Bitcoin race car for many years. It’s about time to take a turn out front.

This is my vision for how Litecoin and Bitcoin will work together to solve the world’s transaction needs in the future. And it is why the Silver to Bitcoin’s Gold analogy always resonated with me. Do you want to come along for the ride?