Support for Segregated Witness continues to build on the Bitcoin network, even though the growth is going a lot slower than people anticipated. After over a week of signaling, we are still only at 30% support. This indicates that a lot of miners either do not care or have no interest in the Bitcoin Core block size solution.
Another Small Step Forward For SegWit Activation
Once the signaling began for Segregated Witness, it became quickly apparent that the community would not immediately embrace this solution en masse. Instead, it is still up to individual mining pools to integrate this new proposal and see how their users will respond. Up until this point, there are quite a few pools who have yet to finalize their implementation.
Bitcoin Core 0.13.1 SegWit signalling breaks through resistance at 30% pic.twitter.com/KypGeQFTWi
— Alistair Milne (@alistairmilne) November 30, 2016
To be more precise, the support for SegWit signaling has finally surpassed the 30% barrier. That is a significant milestone, but there is still a very long way to go before this block size solution will be activated on the network. Until at least 90% of the network supports it, Segregated Witness will not go live.
Although support has grown over time, barely surpassing 30%, network support after two full weeks is not instilling much confidence for the future of SegWit. Even though major pools are working on the integration, there is an expiry timer after which this proposal will become automatically invalid. For those people who had hoped to resolve the block size debacle before New Year’s Eve 2017, things will need to change drastically.
That being said, once the support surpassed the 30% threshold, it jumped to 35% almost immediately. With over one-third of the network casting its vote already, and very few people openly opposing Segregated Witness, it could only be a matter of time until the rest of the network follows suit. With Bitcoin Unlimited in contention as well, no one knows what might happen moving forward, though.
Rest assured this is not the final time that news about either SegWit or Bitcoin Unlimited will make the headlines. The Bitcoin block size debate is in full effect, and the opinions remain divided. Bigger blocks are the inevitable outcome of both solutions, and the only question is which increments will be used along the way.
If you liked this article, follow us on Twitter @themerklenews and make sure to subscribe to our newsletter to receive the latest bitcoin, cryptocurrency, and technology news.
