Post your SegWit questions here - open discussion - big week for Bitcoin!

[mda]

Yes. Segwit and 1 MB block means that the non-witness space of a block is 1 MB, and witness space is 3 MB, so the entire block is actually 4 MB. Segwit and 2 MB block means that non-witness space of a block is 2 MB and witness space is 6 MB so the entire block is actually 8 MB.

In this case SegWit and 2MB block won't be sustainable, 8MB total block size is too much at the moment. And to count only non-witness part doesn't make any sense, let's say SegWit and 4MB block or SegWit and 8MB block.

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[layoutph]

I have a question. Since segwit requires 95% of miners to upgrade. What if 20% from these are Bitcoin core enemies doesnt want to upgrade to delay the segwit upgrading of Bitcoin core? Are we going to stuck from very slow blockchain forever? Sorry If my question doesnt have any sense

[achow101]

I have a question. Since segwit requires 95% of miners to upgrade. What if 20% from these are Bitcoin core enemies doesnt want to upgrade to delay the segwit upgrading of Bitcoin core? Are we going to stuck from very slow blockchain forever? Sorry If my question doesnt have any sense

Then we won't get segwit for a while.

There are movements such as the UASF (User Activated Soft Fork) movement which aims to get segwit activated without relying entirely upon the miners. Should the UASF be successful, then Segwit will be activated.

Don't conflate the blockchain with the speed of which your transactions confirming. The blockchain is not slow. Rather there are more unconfirmed transactions being made than can be included in blocks.

[classicsucks]

I have a question. Since segwit requires 95% of miners to upgrade. What if 20% from these are Bitcoin core enemies doesnt want to upgrade to delay the segwit upgrading of Bitcoin core? Are we going to stuck from very slow blockchain forever? Sorry If my question doesnt have any sense

Then we won't get segwit for a while.

There are movements such as the UASF (User Activated Soft Fork) movement which aims to get segwit activated without relying entirely upon the miners. Should the UASF be successful, then Segwit will be activated.

Don't conflate the blockchain with the speed of which your transactions confirming. The blockchain is not slow. Rather there are more unconfirmed transactions being made than can be included in blocks.

UASF is utter crap. It could never work, and would only cause a giant cluster-f**k on the bitcoin network. Even the Core devs have denounced the idea. UASF is mostly a straw man to scare miners into submission so they adopt Segwit. The mempool spam is likely another FUD tactic to push Segwit forward.

Only problem is, Segwit adoption is not moving, and BU keeps gaining hashpower as the standoff continues...

[-ck]

Only problem is, Segwit adoption is not moving, and BU keeps gaining hashpower as the standoff continues...

BU is not gaining hashpower - the same pools have been advertising it for a long time now, and the backroom dealings regarding segwit are actually most likely to give fruit. I agree UASF is a threat, and I don't particularly like it myself either, however it looks like the miners are going to reluctantly come on board with their coordinated agreement. I don't like the backroom dealings either, but none of this would have been necessary if not for the hostile takeover attempt from Roger Ver. Fortunately bitcoin is bigger than one person, and Jihan Wu discovered he didn't have as much power as he thought either. Miners will argue that they agreed to a 2MB blocksize increase at the same time and when segwit gets activated and their 2MB blocksize doesn't immediately get agreed to in 12 months, they can cry foul. Perhaps that's actually a ploy on the part of the negotiators - give the miners something to complain about after segwit gets activated so they can regain some face after losing face when they backtracked after all their incredibly aggressive stance against it earlier.

[classicsucks]

Only problem is, Segwit adoption is not moving, and BU keeps gaining hashpower as the standoff continues...

BU is not gaining hashpower - the same pools have been advertising it for a long time now, and the backroom dealings regarding segwit are actually most likely to give fruit. I agree UASF is a threat, and I don't particularly like it myself either, however it looks like the miners are going to reluctantly come on board with their coordinated agreement. I don't like the backroom dealings either, but none of this would have been necessary if not for the hostile takeover attempt from Roger Ver. Fortunately bitcoin is bigger than one person, and Jihan Wu discovered he didn't have as much power as he thought either. Miners will argue that they agreed to a 2MB blocksize increase at the same time and when segwit gets activated and their 2MB blocksize doesn't immediately get agreed to in 12 months, they can cry foul. Perhaps that's actually a ploy on the part of the negotiators - give the miners something to complain about after segwit gets activated so they can regain some face after losing face when they backtracked after all their incredibly aggressive stance against it earlier.

Fair enough. However, BU hashing surpassed Segwit months ago, and it definitely hasn't lost any ground. I see BU signalling at 41% and Thin blocks adding another 9% - that's 50% against Segwit's mere 34%!  I'm sorry about the backroom deals too. That's how corporations work. The "takeover attempt" is not by Roger Ver (you must be joking!), it's by Wall Street, Silicon Valley venture money, the Chinese government, other state actors, etc. Ver is a tiny little goldfish swimming around in a tank full of sharks, whales, and giant vampire squids with blood funnels. 

Segwit was never a given. Blockstream still hasn't proven that we'll all need Lightning and there is no other way forward.

[jubalix]

merge mine BU and SEGWIT with BTC using same distribution of coins on addresses as the starting point

[manlan1997]

It looks likely LTC will incorporate seg witness first. That will be interesting indeed.

[hieuho381]

In what way has Segwit failed? It still has another 10 months to go before the activation period is up.

[-ck]

It still has another 10 months to go before the activation period is up.

~5 Months.

[merve10495]

This is an extremely nooby question however I haven't been following segwit at all until today.
If I have 'x' bitcoins in current blockchain before the fork, and the fork goes forward - will those bitcoins be worthless? Am I needing to discard them and re-purchase or mine on the new block? Or will everything carry over?

If segwit occurs what does a regular joe like me who just hodl's bitcoin for years do with his coins to ensure he can keep their value?

[achow101]

Any fork will maintain the blockchain prior to the fork, so any coins from before the fork will always exist on the two blockchains created by a fork.

How a fork will affect the value of a coin cannot be known.

[laiducnam]

What I don't understand is that if soft-forks are backward compatible why would other miners reject it? Doesn't backward compatibility mean that new blocks are seen as valid by old clients? And if you wait everyone to update what is the benefit for soft-fork? Is there a con of Hard-Fork if it has 95% support?

[achow101]

What I don't understand is that if soft-forks are backward compatible why would other miners reject it? Doesn't backward compatibility mean that new blocks are seen as valid by old clients?

There are more things to consider than just whether the blocks that are produced will be valid. There are other concerns too. For example, segwit will likely reduce transaction fees. Thus a miner will be opposed to segwit since they will make less money in the short term if it activates. But at the same time, activating segwit can also earn them more money in the long term.

And if you wait everyone to update what is the benefit for soft-fork?

Soft forks only require miners upgrade. It means that soft forks are more likely to successfully activate as less people need to upgrade and that those who don't upgrade won't be kicked off of the network. The reason most miners need to upgrade is so that chain splits do not happen if a block that is invalid under the new rules is mined.

Is there a con of Hard-Fork if it has 95% support?

The remaining 5% could, in theory, maintain a separate blockchain but uses the same blockchain parameters as the main blockchain but with different consensus rules. Also, keep in mind that with a hard fork, basically everyone (miners and users) need to upgrade whilst with a soft fork, only the miners really need to upgrade.

[longpro098]

I find it very hard to believe that implementing Segwit support in existing software will be easier than a 2MB hard fork, please cite a source for this.

[achow101]

I find it very hard to believe that implementing Segwit support in existing software will be easier than a 2MB hard fork, please cite a source for this.

It isn't that it is easier to implement but rather it is easier to deploy segwit than it is to deploy a 2 MB hard fork. In general, soft forks are easier to deploy as less people are required to upgrade and those that do not upgrade won't be kicked off of the network. OTOH, a hard fork requires everyone to upgrade in order for them to not be kicked off of the network. Having everyone upgrade is significantly harder than getting most of the miners and some users to upgrade.

[classicsucks]

I find it very hard to believe that implementing Segwit support in existing software will be easier than a 2MB hard fork, please cite a source for this.

It isn't that it is easier to implement but rather it is easier to deploy segwit than it is to deploy a 2 MB hard fork. In general, soft forks are easier to deploy as less people are required to upgrade and those that do not upgrade won't be kicked off of the network. OTOH, a hard fork requires everyone to upgrade in order for them to not be kicked off of the network. Having everyone upgrade is significantly harder than getting most of the miners and some users to upgrade.

Absolute bollocks. The 2013 a bitcoin hard fork was accomplished in less than 48 hours. Segwit is hugely complicated, and as a result has been sitting around incomplete for almost a year. Even on Litecoin, with lower activation threshold, Segwit took several months and much cajoling to activate.

Furthermore, Segwit changes almost 6000 lines of code versus one line for a 2MB hard fork.

Viitalik Buterin, well-respected creator of Ethereum, says that soft forks are more coercive than hard forks:
http://vitalik.ca/general/2017/03/14/forks_and_markets.html

Hard forks happen all of the time on production blockchains without incident. For example, Monero ($600 mil market cap) has hard forked 4 times in the past year.

[achow101]

Absolute bollocks.

Actually your post is absolute bollocks.

The 2013 a bitcoin hard fork was accomplished in less than 48 hours.

Actually, it was not.

First of all, the hard fork was entirely unintentional. Secondly, deploying the final change that actually changed the consensus rules still took ~6 months before the situation was considered completely resolved with a block that would have been invalid under the old rules being mined and accepted by the network. The first chain split happened around the end of March. The block that marked the issue as resolved (since it would have been invalid to older clients) was mined in August (block 0000000000000024b58eeb1134432f00497a6a860412996e7a260f47126eed07) ~6 months after the initial chain split.

Segwit is hugely complicated, and as a result has been sitting around incomplete for almost a year.

Segwit is absolutely complete. It is not activated yet, but the code is absolutely complete and those clients which are supporting it have long since completed their implementations and testing of it. In fact, part of the reason it's start date was delayed was because other wallet developers will still implementing it and testing it and wanted segwit to be done by the time the activation period started.

Furthermore, Segwit changes almost 6000 lines of code versus one line for a 2MB hard fork.

You are comparing apples to oranges here. The segwit changes includes tests and deployment. Your one line of change for a 2MB hard fork contains no tests and no safe deployment parameters. IIRC if you add in the necessary tests, deployment logic, and other necessary parameter changes to make it deploy safely (as with Bitcoin Classic), then you end up with ~2000 lines of code changed.

Hard forks happen all of the time on production blockchains without incident. For example, Monero ($600 mil market cap) has hard forked 4 times in the past year.

But no altcoin has the same environment as Bitcoin. None have the same market cap, visibility, number of users, trade volume, etc. No altcoin is comparable to the Bitcoin and cannot serve as accurate measures as to how successfully a hard fork on Bitcoin would be.

[classicsucks]

The 2013 a bitcoin hard fork was accomplished in less than 48 hours.

Actually, it was not.

First of all, the hard fork was entirely unintentional. Secondly, deploying the final change that actually changed the consensus rules still took ~6 months before the situation was considered completely resolved with a block that would have been invalid under the old rules being mined and accepted by the network. The first chain split happened around the end of March. The block that marked the issue as resolved (since it would have been invalid to older clients) was mined in August (block 0000000000000024b58eeb1134432f00497a6a860412996e7a260f47126eed07) ~6 months after the initial chain split.

There were 2 hard forks, one unintentional fork due to a database locking bug, and a second intentional hard fork to fix the bug. Everyone worked together, and the drama was over in 48 hours. A few old servers continued running the broken release, but they were ignored and caused no problems on the network. Don't believe me, read the official Core account of what happened: https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0050.mediawiki

Segwit is hugely complicated, and as a result has been sitting around incomplete for almost a year.

Segwit is absolutely complete. It is not activated yet, but the code is absolutely complete and those clients which are supporting it have long since completed their implementations and testing of it. In fact, part of the reason it's start date was delayed was because other wallet developers will still implementing it and testing it and wanted segwit to be done by the time the activation period started.

Funny, that's not what the official Core Segwit support page says: https://bitcoincore.org/en/segwit_adoption/
 
There are still upwards of 20,000 lines of code in support software that still haven't been written. Another reason Segwit is simply dead in the water.

Hard forks happen all of the time on production blockchains without incident. For example, Monero ($600 mil market cap) has hard forked 4 times in the past year.

But no altcoin has the same environment as Bitcoin. None have the same market cap, visibility, number of users, trade volume, etc. No altcoin is comparable to the Bitcoin and cannot serve as accurate measures as to how successfully a hard fork on Bitcoin would be.
[/quote]

Ahh, the "not a true Scotsman" fallacy, yet again. Actually, Ethereum DOES have a comparable market cap to Bitcoin, and it DID have a hard fork AND a chain split. And they're going strong (much to my chagrin).

Simple facts are:

* Bitcoin and other cryptos have hard forked hundreds of times without issue.
* The proposed Segwit soft fork, whether sound or not, has failed
* The only hard fork that resulted in a split was Ethereum, because the devs rolled back the chain and restored stolen DAO coins, in direct violation of the consensus rules.

[achow101]

There were 2 hard forks, one unintentional fork due to a database locking bug, and a second intentional hard fork to fix the bug. Everyone worked together, and the drama was over in 48 hours. A few old servers continued running the broken release, but they were ignored and caused no problems on the network. Don't believe me, read the official Core account of what happened: https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0050.mediawiki

The drama most certainly was not over in 48 hours. The intentional hard fork to fix the problem took until August 2013 while the unintentional one occurred several months before that in March 2013. Up until Autust, everyone was still using the consensus rules forced by the database locks. Even in the emergency situation, a hard fork still took several months to actually deploy. We aren't in such a situation now; a hard fork will need to take longer to deploy so that all of its consequences can be considered and tested.

There are still upwards of 20,000 lines of code in support software that still haven't been written. Another reason Segwit is simply dead in the water.

Just because what seems like a large number of lines of code have yet to be written does not mean that it is "dead in the water". More than half of the companies, services, and wallets listed on the segwit adoption page have already completed their implementations.