Segwit soft fork is probably the best possibility for investors right now

[r0ach]

A segwit or 4 MB hard fork right before the halving would've really thrown a monkey wrench into the markets that could negatively affected post-halving prices/pump.  If the hard fork happened in January, it would probably be OK, but if they tried to roll it out 3 months before halving (probably how long it would take), it would be a problem.  It appears segwit is being soft forked in now instead, so there will be an increase in TPS and you won't have to worry about any major market turmoil until post halving.

Gmaxwell and Luke Jr, both of which had terminal small block disease, have signed onto it respectively 13 hours and 1 hour ago.

TLDR: Bullish for short and mid term, with an actual hard fork occurring Q4 2016 at the earliest, or possibly sometime in 2017.

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[Amph]

no need to do it anymore, apaprently they found a way to have 4mb without increasing it to 4 mb

it's called segregated witness, still i want to now more about the possible weakness

[sickpig]

no need to do it anymore, apaprently they found a way to have 4mb without increasing it to 4 mb

it's called segregated witness, still i want to now more about the possible weakness

SegWit won't give 4MB,  or better it gives you such a gain only if the all txs included in the
block are 3-of-3 multisig.

On average (depending on txs type) you'll get a virtual size equivalent to 1.6-2.0 * 1MB.

[lucasjkr]

Why would bigger blocks before the halving throw a monkey wrench in anywhere? Seems to me that that would be optimal, to increase available space for to be able to collect additional transaction fees.

[r0ach]

Why would bigger blocks before the halving throw a monkey wrench in anywhere? Seems to me that that would be optimal, to increase available space for to be able to collect additional transaction fees.

Because in a sideways market, the fork would happen, then the price would drop from fears of failure of consensus, then after it succeeded, price would return to normal and maybe go up.

If for example, price was $400 pre-halving and $800 after halving, dropping a hard fork that crashes the market temporarily way under $400 might cause it's post halving value to be lower and not go to $800 in the same situation.

[Amph]

no need to do it anymore, apaprently they found a way to have 4mb without increasing it to 4 mb

it's called segregated witness, still i want to now more about the possible weakness

SegWit won't give 4MB,  or better it gives you such a gain only if the all txs included in the
block are 3-of-3 multisig.

On average (depending on txs type) you'll get a virtual size equivalent to 1.6-2.0 * 1MB.

yeah 4 is as a maximum, didn't know that the average was only 2, but is still enough for a small egde, without breaking anything else

at this point they could have just increased it to two and that's it...

[sickpig]

no need to do it anymore, apaprently they found a way to have 4mb without increasing it to 4 mb

it's called segregated witness, still i want to now more about the possible weakness

SegWit won't give 4MB,  or better it gives you such a gain only if the all txs included in the
block are 3-of-3 multisig.

On average (depending on txs type) you'll get a virtual size equivalent to 1.6-2.0 * 1MB.

yeah 4 is as a maximum, didn't know that the average was only 2, but is still enough for a small egde, without breaking anything else

at this point they could have just increased it to two and that's it...

pwuille (sipa) said that the typical gain would be 1.75

that said SegWit will be deployed through a soft-fork hat means that you want 1.75 since the activation.

more realistically after 6 months from the activation you could expect an adoption rate between 25  and 50%, hence the real capacity would something like 1.3

[Amph]

no need to do it anymore, apaprently they found a way to have 4mb without increasing it to 4 mb

it's called segregated witness, still i want to now more about the possible weakness

SegWit won't give 4MB,  or better it gives you such a gain only if the all txs included in the
block are 3-of-3 multisig.

On average (depending on txs type) you'll get a virtual size equivalent to 1.6-2.0 * 1MB.

yeah 4 is as a maximum, didn't know that the average was only 2, but is still enough for a small egde, without breaking anything else

at this point they could have just increased it to two and that's it...

pwuille (sipa) said that the typical gain would be 1.75

that said SegWit will be deployed through a soft-fork hat means that you want 1.75 since the activation.

more realistically after 6 months from the activation you could expect an adoption rate between 25  and 50%, hence the real capacity would something like 1.3

well 1.3 is very underwhelming, i'm not so sure anymore if it will make any difference in case the adoption rate, will take off for whatever reason in the future, and before another(an hard fork presumably) change is needed

[sickpig]

no need to do it anymore, apaprently they found a way to have 4mb without increasing it to 4 mb

it's called segregated witness, still i want to now more about the possible weakness

SegWit won't give 4MB,  or better it gives you such a gain only if the all txs included in the
block are 3-of-3 multisig.

On average (depending on txs type) you'll get a virtual size equivalent to 1.6-2.0 * 1MB.

yeah 4 is as a maximum, didn't know that the average was only 2, but is still enough for a small egde, without breaking anything else

at this point they could have just increased it to two and that's it...

pwuille (sipa) said that the typical gain would be 1.75

that said SegWit will be deployed through a soft-fork hat means that you want 1.75 since the activation.

more realistically after 6 months from the activation you could expect an adoption rate between 25  and 50%, hence the real capacity would something like 1.3

well 1.3 is very underwhelming, i'm not so sure anymore if it will make any difference in case the adoption rate, will take off for whatever reason in the future, and before another(an hard fork presumably) change is needed

add to that we have to take into account that 50% adoption after 6 month from the activation is a very optimistic scenario. this means 1.1375 in case of more realistic estimate.

[sickpig]

Just for the sake of completeness

The current proposal for soft fork segregated witness (segwit) counts each byte in a witness as 0.25 bytes
towards the maximum block size limit, meaning the maximum size of a block is just under 4MB.

However, blocks are not expected to consist entirely of witness data and each non-witness byte is counted
as 1.00 bytes towards the maximum block size limit, so blocks near 4MB in size would be unlikely.

According to some calculations performed by Anthony Towns, a block filled with standard single-signature
P2PKH transactions would be about 1.6MB and a block filled with 2-of-2 multisignature transactions would
be about 2.0MB.

[Cconvert2G36]

And there's this...

http://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2015-December/012103.html

Complexity is tough to get right, and it's the unknown unknowns that get you. If this is being sold on its speedy deployment, I beg to differ. 

[sickpig]

And there's this...

http://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2015-December/012103.html

Complexity is tough to get right, and it's the unknown unknowns that get you. If this is being sold on its speedy deployment, I beg to differ. 

sorry can't resist:

Some ideas are easy to explain but hard to execute. Other ideas are easy to execute but hard to explain. Segregated witness (segwit) seems to be the latter.

[birr]

Peter Wuille on segregated witness:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=fst1IK_mrng&time_continue=2179

Skip the first 35 minutes, it's blank.  Why they didn't edit out the dead time I have no idea.
Wuille's presentation on segwit is well worth watching.
Segwit is really an ingenious solution to inherent inefficiencies in Bitcoin, and has multiple benefits.  Extra room in the blocks is just the icing on the cake.

[sickpig]

Peter Wuille on segregated witness:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=fst1IK_mrng&time_continue=2179

Skip the first 35 minutes, it's blank.  Why they didn't edit out the dead time I have no idea.
Wuille's presentation on segwit is well worth watching.
Segwit is really an ingenious solution to inherent inefficiencies in Bitcoin, and has multiple benefits.  Extra room in the blocks is just the icing on the cake.

fwiw same presentation at San Francisco bitcoin meetup:

https://youtu.be/NOYNZB5BCHM

that said SegWit is definitely ingenious, nevertheless a two critical points:

- proposed development timeframe is too short (look at issues reported by Peter Todd here http://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2015-December/012103.html)

- in terms of block size increase it's equal to having a slow ramping to a new 1.3/1.5MB cap in 12-18months.