Scaling bitcoin remains one of the more pressing matters in the cryptocurrency space right now. Although it may take a few more months until a viable solution is found that pleases the majority of the miners, it appears SegWit is in a prime position to get activated. After all, Segregated Witness is clearly ahead of Bitcoin unlimited, as this latter solution is seeing its support dwindle rather quickly.
Segregated Witness Is Still The Favorable Solution
A lot has been said about Segregated Witness and Bitcoin Unlimited in the past. While not everyone may see eye-to-eye on which concept is “better”, the entire debate has turned into a political mockery as of late. With community members of either solution trying to dissuade others from gathering all of the facts, it is evident something will have to change sooner rather than later.
Most mining pool support either SegWit or Unlimited, it is evident the majority of miners are in favor of Segregated Witness activating on the network. That being said, SegWit has 27% support right now, whereas it needs roughly 95% before it can effectively activate on the network moving forward. It will take some time until this threshold is reached, yet things have been evolving in the right direction these past few weeks.
Bitcoin Unlimited is losing support rather quickly, albeit no one is entirely sure why this is the case. A few weeks ago, Bitcoin Unlimited support was on par to surpass SegWit numbers, yet that trend did not materialize in the end. In fact, the support has dropped from nearly 23% to 16.7%, indicating miners are slowly backing off from pools supporting Unlimited.
Moreover, some Bitcoin experts have grown concerned over what the future may hold for bitcoin. Charlie Lee publicly stated how he feels Bitcoin Unlimited supporters are effectively trying to keep this “issue” ongoing. After all, users are forced to pay higher transaction fees as long as bitcoin does not scale to accommodate a bigger block size. It can be in some miners and pools’ best interest to keep blocking scalability in an effort to earn more money from the increasing transaction fees. Whether or not that is the objective for some people, remains unclear.
It is evident blocking SegWit adoption and activation is not in the best interest of bitcoin by any means. Miners clearly favor this solution over Bitcoin Unlimited, which makes it very likely to activate on the network in the near future. Although a lot of pools still have to integrate SegWit support, the list of companies supporting this solution has been growing steadily these past few months. An activation of Segregated Witness may be imminent, although the timeframe remains a bit unclear for the time being.
With support from some of the world’s largest bitcoin mining pools, it is evident SegWit is the only solution with a legitimate chance of activating on the network. Over 800 out of the latest 1,000 network blocks were mined through pools running the Bitcoin Core client. Moreover, 78.52% of the network’s hashrate belongs to pools running Bitcoin Core. Unlimited is not a bad scaling solution by any means, but SegWit is superior in all regards, according to the statistics.
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