Segregated Witness Activated: A New Episode For Bitcoin

Earlier this morning, the long awaited segregrated witness (called segwit2x) activated on, bringing the years-long argument over the controversial code upgrade to an official close.

The key things that segwit is believed to enable are; the rearrangement of how data is stored in bitcoin blocks, boost in capacity while remaining compatible with past versions of the software and removal of transaction malleability, a bug that's been the primary roadblock for many bitcoin projects.

Bach Nguyen of Trezor also stated that SegWit will increase the security of Trezor and hardware wallets since it eliminates the necessity of requesting previous transactions, saving time for users and reduction on verification periods means lower probability of potential security issues from occurring.

“It might seem to be a trivial change, but the security implications are large. The lower the amount of operations the hardware wallets need to do, the lower the probability of something going awry,” said Nguyen.

Many developers tremendously trust SegWit will boost the improvement of additional forward-looking technologies necessary for bitcoin's mainstream use, most especially, the Lightning Network which was first proposed in a 2015 white paper by Joseph Poon and Tadge Dryja. The idea is payment channels that move transactions off the blockchain could boost bitcoin's capacity to millions of transactions per second.

While SegWit is believed to enable a bright future for bitcoin for some users, some bitcoin users still believe SegWit is the wrong choice, which eventually led to the recent fork of the bitcoin blockchain, creating a new version entirely called bitcoin cash. Now, bitcoin and bitcoin cash are competing, putting two credos to the test – with real money on the line.

The next question now is, which of this 2 cryptocurrencies has the best technical roadmap? Which will attract the most users and attention? And which will remain the most decentralized? Or, do both of them have advnatages?

As much as we do not know the answers to those question, we are certain the activation of segwit is a step closer to establishing whether the recommended scaling capability is still on course.