[2018-11-08] What Caused the Sudden Drop in SegWit Blocks on Bitcoin?

[Lmaooo]

Blockchain detectives and Lightning Proponents may have noticed a severe drop in SegWit blocks near the end of last month. SegWit-spending transactions had reached a high of nearly 50% of all transactions, according to this tracker, but around about October 20th the rate began to drop off, hitting a low of nearly 40%.

Users who noticed might have been mystified – if those many people were previously spending SegWit-enabled inputs, why would they suddenly stop? SegWit transactions generally cost less as they are smaller in actual size, and therefore it is less expensive to send them with priority.

A Bitcoin newsletter familiar with the deep technological aspect of Bitcoin has a theory that makes sense: at least one major mining pool accidentally stopped processing the transactions.

    A simple explanation for this sudden decrease and rebound could be a minor misconfiguration. By default, Bitcoin Core does not produce segwit-including blocks in order to maintain getblocktemplate (GBT) compatibility with older pre-segwit mining software. When miners change their software or configuration, it’s easily possible to forget to pass the extra flag to enable segwit. To illustrate how easy it is to make this mistake, the example below calls GBT with its default parameter and its segwit parameter—and then compares the results by the total potential block reward (subsidy + fees) each block template could earn.

CCN | https://www.ccn.com/what-caused-the-sudden-drop-in-segwit-blocks-on-bitcoin/

[1Referee]

It's likely the increase in on-chain transactions that lead to Segwit being pushed back to ~40%. Most of the people who took a break from this market earlier this year very likely still use non Segwit clients, or clients that require a manual adjustment they aren't aware of.

If you look at Litecoin's on-chain transaction activity, it's still more or less the same, which reflects in its Segwit usage that has booked a slight increase. Considering that Segwit for Litecoin was activated well before Bitcoin, it directly explains the steady growth, which Bitcoin still has to work on.

Blockchain.com and BitPay still haven't done anything yet with Segwit, and I'm honestly not sure if they ever will. Roger is a parasite as main shareholder, and he deliberately blocks their upgrade plans.

[Carlton Banks]

Even though segwit in blocks once hit 50%, the whole of the Bitcoin supply is mostly stored in the old address types (about 98-99% in fact). It will take time for everyone to switch over. I still haven't switched my BTC to segwit addresses yet (some, but not all), despite the wallet software I use supporting it.

Hitting 50% usage per block, then falling back to 40% is just natural variation in people using segwit. With fees still low, it makes most sense right now to move BTC to segwit addresses (which uses a non segwit transaction), and there's evidence that people are doing just that (levels of segwit address usage have been slowly rising towards 2% of total BTC)

[BitHodler]

Blockchain.com and BitPay still haven't done anything yet with Segwit, and I'm honestly not sure if they ever will. Roger is a parasite as main shareholder, and he deliberately blocks their upgrade plans.

Both services are on decline and it's well deserved. If you let the roadmap of an imbecile affect a business that once was so successful to this degree, you shouldn't be running it, period. I would voluntarily leave.

By the time payment processors adapt to roll out LN support but BitPay doesn't, they'll more than ever realize that what they have been doing is wrong. If they don't adapt to the progress here they will lose their dominance.

It's so clear that Roger and Jihan fear SegWit and Litecoin. Any normal thinking being would do everything to increase revenue and profits, but not these Bcash suckers. Money for the world, my ass.

[d5000]

Is Antpool's "exclusion" of Segwit transactions related to that topic?

https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/9sex11/jihan_no_longer_includes_segwit_transactions_last/ (the thread is already 10 days old, however)

In theory, this could lead to a higher transaction fee for Segwit transactions in comparison to "normal" transactions, and also to a longer confirmation time, reducing their attractiveness. However, I haven't read complaints about delays. I didn't find details about that behaviour (and don't know if Antpool still behaves that way or if it was only a short-lived experiment) but I admit I also haven't searched the btc-related sources too thoroughly.

[figmentofmyass]

Is Antpool's "exclusion" of Segwit transactions related to that topic?

https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/9sex11/jihan_no_longer_includes_segwit_transactions_last/ (the thread is already 10 days old, however)

In theory, this could lead to a higher transaction fee for Segwit transactions in comparison to "normal" transactions, and also to a longer confirmation time, reducing their attractiveness. However, I haven't read complaints about delays.

that's really interesting. related delays might not be that obvious since antpool only controls <15% of the hash rate.

i've noticed they have some wonky transaction policies---they consistently don't publish full blocks, even in cases where a long time has passed between blocks and there are several thousand (paying) unconfirmed transactions. sometimes i wondered why their miners would put up with this, then i realized they don't pay out collected transaction fees.

[DooMAD]

My take on Antpool isn't that they're deliberately excluding SegWit transactions, but they do seem to place greater emphasis on claiming the block reward at the expense of filling blocks.  So on the occasions where they do include transactions in their blocks, they'll naturally take the ones with the highest fees.  And those with the highest fees tend to be the non-SegWit ones.

At the time of writing, the last two blocks mined by Antpool were 1,177.84 and 1,125.78 KB, so it's not like they're refusing to include them.

[d5000]

My take on Antpool isn't that they're deliberately excluding SegWit transactions, but they do seem to place greater emphasis on claiming the block reward at the expense of filling blocks.

Yep, that seems the case (I think I read it in one of your replies in another thread). However, the incentive manipulation is the same - they seem to use a special software to "bypass" the weight measure, which was introduced to reward Segwit-transaction users, and decided again taking into account the price per kB.

The good news is that there's an easy counter-measure every Bitcoin user can help with - continue to increase the usage of Segwit transactions, and avoiding services which do not offer them (according to the Reddit thread, some of them do this for ideological reasons, and considering that Segwit is active for more than a year now, I tend to agree). If this practice continues, I'll publish a list of "Segwit-boycotting services"

The more the Segwit percentage increases, the less Segwit transactions pools can discard if they are rational and don't want to lose money.

[Carlton Banks]

re: Antpool and non-segwit blocks, it doesn't bother me.

• As time goes on, legacy transactions will be paying to increasing numbers of segwit addresses. The amount of legacy transactions will gradually shrink, so this is a short term phenomenon
• Antpool are keeping the average block size smaller with this practice, which has advantages too
• If pools were to consistently favor segwit over legacy, the opportunity to move BTC from legacy to segwit is reduced. Having a conservative small blocker mining pool like Antpool around ensures the freedom to switch to segwit

Let's not forget another aspect to this also; miners are beginning to designate bech32 native segwit addresses for their block reward payouts. This will create a big incentive to continue to use bech32 for any recipients of those coins, as there can be no privacy loss when using it.