Bitcoin Forum

The year started with good news about Bitcoin’s urgently needed optimizations. Indeed, key entities of the cryptocurrency ecosystem began the year by rushing to become Segregated Witness (SegWit) compatible. Specifically, BTC.com and LocalBitcoins.com are implementing SegWit from the first business day of 2018.

SEGWIT WILL HELP REDUCE TRANSACTION FEES

Dr. Pieter Wuille proposed SegWit in December 2015. Then it was activated in August 2017. Segwit promises to improve Bitcoin’s scalability and reduce Bitcoin’s transaction fees. It also helps to fix transaction malleability.

Since its activation, developers have been increasingly integrating SegWit into Bitcoin wallets, and many exchanges have been implementing SegWit.

Most recently, on January 2, 2018, BTC.com announced the release of a wallet integrating SegWit. According to the release statement:

As a BTC.com wallet user, you will experience a drop in the transaction fees and faster transaction times, when you send bitcoin to another address.

On the same date, January 2, 2018, LocalBitcoins.com, one of the largest person-to-person Bitcoin trading websites, also announced that it is now SegWit compatible.

Moreover, Coinbase is also planning to implement SegWit in 2018. Coinbase’s announcement explains:

For those unfamiliar with SegWit, this upgrade helps reduce the size of transactions, which improves the overall transaction capacity of the Bitcoin network. This upgrade should also help reduce the fees customers pay on bitcoin transactions.

SEGWIT’S RATE OF ADOPTION IS INCREASING

Segwit was implemented in August 2016. Since then, the adoption rate of SegWit has been steadily gaining momentum. Thus, in addition to BTC.Com and LocalBitcoins.com, several other cryptocurrency entities have already adopted SegWit, as shown in the list below that Whalepool compiled:

SEGWIT INCREASES BLOCK CAPACITY AND SOLVES MALLEABILITY ISSUES

Dr. Pieter Wuille proposed SegWit with the purpose of optimizing Bitcoin performance. Noting that digital signatures occupy about 65 percent of the block space, optimization is achieved by updating the Bitcoin software so that the signature data is segregated from the transaction data.

According to Dr. Wuille, some of SegWit’s advantages include: Dropping signature from the relay (gaining over 60 percent of block space), pruning old signatures, and solving all unintentional malleability. Dr. Wuille outlines:

With Segregated Witness, the specification of a transaction’s effects on the ledger is separated from the data necessary to prove its validity (called a witness in cryptography). This completely eliminates all known forms of transaction malleability, and allows significant blockchain pruning optimizations.

Bitcoin is starting the year on the right foot because several new technologies and schemes are being put forward to address Bitcoin’s scalability problem. These initiatives include SegWit, Lightning Network, and Schnorr signatures. Many Bitcoin enthusiasts and investors hope that these efforts will receive support from all stakeholders and move forward successfully.

http://bitcoinist.com/2018-to-be-the-year-of-segwit/

I am not so familiar with how technically this whole beast can be working but am more interested on how it will finally bring down the transaction cost which have became monstrously laughable in the past many weeks and we need something much better since we are already in 2018. Reading the post above, we should realize how sluggish can the adoption of an upgrade is in the Bitcoin ecosystem...this can be partly because Bitcoin is working using the consensus style of management and we don't have one person who will decide for all of us unlike with some centralized cryptocurrencies. For now, what we need are just two things: 1. reduce the fees to acceptable level and 2. make the transactions fast as they should be. Once these goals are accomplished, we can gain back the lost trust and confidence of those who already left Bitcoin for other cryptos. I am a firm believer in Bitcoin and it pained me that some former loyalists have already shifted camps and promoting the rivals to the King of Cryptos.

This is very good and positive news for BTC regarding SegWit,especially when we see that LocalBitcoins.com is finally supporting this option and Coinbase is announced it for this year.As soon Coinbase enable SegWit I think blockchain.info wallet will follow and with these two wallets/exchanges we should see some improvements with fees and faster confirmations.

Although list of supporting wallets/services is not too big in this moment,such news are signs we are still making progress in the right direction.It is also nice that good news are coming from developers of Lightning Network which is in the final testing phase and things look promising.

I thought 2017 was the year of SegWit ;) This should be the year for Lightning Network and atomic swaps. But of course, I get the point. This year will see those who don't adopt SW lag behind the rest very quickly. I'm really hoping for more sites to come onboard, but as soon as the big guys like LBC and Coinbase do it, the others will have no choice but to follow or be left behind in the competition.

Once they do, we'll even forgive and forget that all these services deliberately decided to wait - I know it's not an easy nor a simple task to port over all their systems and wallets to SW, but they should realise, the sooner they deal with the pain, the better for them in the long run. Take the losses from consolidating all that legacy dust now, while Bitcoin price is still recovering.

I really hope that will be the case this year and that we can finally move away from the transaction fee and confirmation time drama. I hope other 3rd party companies will start following the lead of localbktcoins and start integrating segwit. It literally only takes a couple of days to implement. And considering the scale and revenue if some of these companies, yes I'm looking at you coinbase, they should easily be able to implement it. If not they're not worth us as their customers. Then we can finally start fixing new problems and implementing new technologies such as LN and perhaps start working on atomic swaps by the end of this year.

And again it is only a promise. The first SegWit was on August of 2017 year and besides successful Bitcoin Cash it didn't bring cheaper and faster transactions, oppositely as I noticed that everything become more slow and more expansive. The coming year is going to be a year of airdrops as a result of SegWits which are going to be use for new speculations with the price of Bitcoin.

I'm pretty sure that services like Coinbase are deliberately sabotaging SegWit adoption to participate in pumping altcoins by keeping Bitcoin fees higher than they could have been. Coinbase and Bitpay were actively supporting SegWit2x, claiming that people will abandon Bitcoin if fees will be too high, but now that they for 5 month already have the ability to lower fees for their customers and still refuse to do so, it's clear that they don't really care about fees and their customers. And what is worse, they also don't batch their withdrawal transactions, which could have reduced fees for them by 80-90%. This perfectly demonstrates why centralized systems can't be trusted and tend to abuse their power, which is why Bitcoin was created in the first place, and we as a community should not let it slide - we should tell newcomers to stay away from Coinbase and other services that support SegWit2x or Bcash.

But what does Coinbase have to do with Bitcoin transaction fees really? I remember that they didn't charge any fees at all at first. When the price as well as the fees rose exponentially earlier the last year, they began taking the transaction fees, but aren't these fees what miners receive, not what Coinbase puts into their pocket? I don't get it.

Very good and timely information. However, I believe that the lightning network would be better in bitcoin, since it allows you not to wait for the confirmation of transactions at all, and also to conduct transactions with small amounts with commissions less than one dollar.
     In general, anything though. so that it works and eliminates these shortcomings of bitcoin, because the bitcoin rating continues to fall.

Finally after  a long year SegWit is being considered and implemented by wallets . That is actually a very good news . People were actually frustrated by the long wait and high mining fees . I don't understand why there were so many oppositions for SegWit when it was being considered to get adopted . Now SegWit is the one saving all of our asses . This updation will surely increase the efficiency and stability in bitcoin making it look more reliable in the eyes of people .
The era of faster transactions is finally here .                                       

Coinbase and other NYA signatories amount for a majority of Bitcoin's transaction traffic, because trading is the most widespread use case for Bitcoin - even when fees where low it was rarely accepted as a currency, much less then current 300,000 transactions per day. So, when those services refuse to implement SegWit, which is a blocksize increase they were asking for, they are keeping network fees artificially high. The same goes for transaction batching, which could save a lot of blockspace and result in cheaper fees for everyone if big players used it, but again, the fact that they haven't implemented such a simple technology can only suggest that they are deliberately acting against Bitcoin's network.

This is all we need for now. The mining fees at present is laughable yet scary.