Can SegWit really be a proven solution (or at least an alt) even for the future?

[Stedsm]

I have seen and admire the use of SegWit transactions over anything now, but we can't deny the fact that the number of transactions have also lowered down compared to what we witnessed during Bitcoin becoming mainstream, and not just that but those spam attacks. When I speak about transactions, it's because of the FUD being created by many countries over crypto by banning activities being conducted by their citizens (recent example: India). I believe that crypto is the future, but will SegWit will still be able to keep up with the amount of users who will join once this becomes something kinda FREEDOM TO KEEP, FREEDOM TO TRADE & FREEDOM TO GIVE? I am seeing some fluctuations still, I'm not worried even if few of my transactions take a few hours to confirm. But will these low costs continue to cater the futuristic users?

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[ahmad21]

Low costs isn't the main stream idea of SegWit or what we say seggregated Witness. It aimed at increasing the number of transactions within a block thereby enhancing the speed only. However pretty less number of people know that the main aim of segwit was to remove the bug of transaction mallebility. But yes Segwit was a much needed step for bitcoin's mass adoption. Now coming to your question that whether it will be sufficient for future. Frankly speaking no one really knows the answer to that. When the whole world will adopt it as a main stream method of settlement ofcourse number of transaction in each block are bound to increase and segwit's increased space will not be enough to cater it. Transaction times will run high and so will be the cost

LN- A way out?

Many propose that Lightning network may be a way out. LN creates a direct channel between two parties with which they can do unlimited transactions without even touching blockchain. So this is sure that it will reduce the amount of load from the blockchain. So for next 4-5 years LN would really be enough in terms of both costs and time.

[Xynerise]

Segwit is not a the scaling solution for bitcoin, but it is a step in the right direction.
The goal is to reduce the individual sizes of transactions so more of them can fit in a block.

The Lightning Network will also play a part, by offloading lots of micropayments off the blockchain.

[BTCforJoe]

In a nutshell, these low costs will be lower than when there was a lower SegWit adoption rate.

Witness data takes up a significant percentage of the transaction space in each block. SegWit effectively displaces the witness data, allowing more of the blocksize to be dedicated to more transactions within the 1MB block size, effectively speeding up the nature of these transactions. Naturally, this also means that unconfirmed transactions won't have to spend so much time in the queue, as each block can now fit more transactions.

In the end, the fees are mainly dependent on the users who pay those fees, which can increase greatly if we ever have another repeat of the 2017/2018 Holiday FOMO run, but technically speaking, the fees should be lower than those of non-SegWit transactions because of how timely those transactions take place in each block compared to non-SW transactions.

Typical transactions (1 Input/2 Outputs) are about 226 bytes in size, while SegWit transactions are either:

• Nested P2SH Address: 166 bytes (26.5% discount)
• Bech32 Address: 141 bytes (37.6% discount)

Imagine this on a larger scale.



Given that the last block (517090 at the time of this post) consisted of 32% SegWit transactions^[1], that is nearly a third of the entire block size that is hosting transactions with these witness discounts.

During the FOMO period between December 2017 and January 2018, the SegWit adoption rate averaged under 13%. With a difference of nearly 20% more current SegWit adoption, I'm going to go out on a limb here and state that if we encounter another FOMO bull market run, the average transaction fee will be at least 20% lower than what it was during DEC/JAN, possibly more, due to the nature of how many more transactions can fit within the 20% SegWit difference...

Either way, this is all speculation, and we won't really know how much of an impact SegWit truly has until we endure another run like the last one we've experienced, so take my findings and speculation with a grain of salt


[1] According to http://segwit.party/charts/

[Stedsm]

Segwit is not a the scaling solution for bitcoin, but it is a step in the right direction.
The goal is to reduce the individual sizes of transactions so more of them can fit in a block.

The Lightning Network will also play a part, by offloading lots of micropayments off the blockchain.

I know that SegWit was not being seen as a way to scale the transactions, but either way it is doing that only by letting users get more discounts over fees if they had more inputs per address. Thing I am not sure about is, will these discounts be manipulated the way we saw during the ATH time period of Bitcoins?

LN- A way out?

Many propose that Lightning network may be a way out. LN creates a direct channel between two parties with which they can do unlimited transactions without even touching blockchain. So this is sure that it will reduce the amount of load from the blockchain. So for next 4-5 years LN would really be enough in terms of both costs and time.

LN has its own limits and blockchain is something that is perfect to show the transactions publicly (if and only if, people want to keep track of their transactions). I guess you won't be able to create channels with exchanges to send them your Bitcoins directly without broadcasting it to the whole network? And if it is so, the exchanges will be working over Blockchain for a period of at least a decade (if not less) in order to keep a track following the rules (and/or regulations of their country). So, when the transactions will increase, will there be this transaction malleability spam and if the network gets congested back, will SegWit be able to keep the fees as low as the normal fee we used to pay in 2015?