Segregated Witness Merge Request Sparks New Debate Among Bitcoin users

Segregated Witness has been touted as the proper solution to solving the Bitcoin block size problem. The Bitcoin Core developers have thoroughly tested the solution and recently merged it with the Bitcoin Core development branch on GitHub. A release for the updated client was not provided at this time, though.

Segregated Witness Is Coming Soon

Bitcoin enthusiasts have been waiting for the release of Segregated Witness for quite some time now. Solving the Bitcoin block size problem should have been done many months ago, and the process has taken longer than expected. Initially, developers assumed the solution would be ready by April 2016.

Unfortunately, that did not happen, albeit hardly anyone will complain about the more thorough testing of this solution. Then again, a delay by several months has caused the community to sit through another round of network congestion about a week ago. Now that the merge request has been approved, things are shifting into the next gear, though.

The Bitcoin community on Reddit is not sharing the enthusiasm of the developers, though. Some people feel that Segwit is such a massive change to the protocol architecture that it technically does not resemble Satoshi’s creation anymore. While the supply cap of Bitcoin is not impacted by Segwit, it is not unlikely that situation may change through a similar soft fork in the future. Albeit this may sound unrealistic, one cannot discount the possibility either.

Moreover, there are some questions as to whether or not a real currency test should be performed before integrating Segregated Witness into Bitcoin. Charlie Lee, the creator of Litecoin, has indicated he would like to port SegWit to LTC in the future. Testing it in that environment might be a good idea as it can give Bitcoin Core devs valuable feedback and work out any remaining bugs or kinks.

Segregated Witness has turned into something more than a solution to solve the Bitcoin block size debate, though. Several malleability vulnerabilities are addressed as part of this implementation. But several Reddit users are not too happy with this solution in general. Caution is a positive thing, and thorough testing through a different currency may not be a bad idea.

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