Any one here who can explain the Segwit upgrade in a simplified way? I can’t seem to understand the upgrade done apart from the structure changes in transaction data and to also fix transaction malleability and I think the increase on the block size. was there any other upgrade? Can someone explain the upgrade better but in a simplified context.
I hope you know about transaction structure to make your understanding easy!
There was two upgrade of Segwit. The first one is Segwit version 0, which is the Segwit that introduced structure changed in the transaction and also fixed transaction malleability while Segwit version 1 introduced Taproot, this introduced a way to make signatures smaller with Schnorr signature to reduced number of signatures and the size in transaction, a new type of script called tapscript and also improved privacy in transaction.
Before the Segwit upgrade, legacy transactions(p2pkh and p2sh) are heavy in bytes and the fees are calculated with sat/byte, paying sats for each byte is expensive but the introduction of Segwit v0 introduced a discount weight unit with the witness field and that made the new fee rate as sat/vbyte and also increased the block size.
The legacy transactions do inlcude signature in the scriptsig, but with Segwit, the signature is removed from the scriptsig to the witness field. So when transactions byte are calculated, the signature is calculated on the discount of witness, you are paying less fee as compared to legacy transactions where signature is included in the scriptsig..
There are couple of threads in the forum about Segwit but the images are broken. Learnmeabitcoin gives summary and basic.
https://learnmeabitcoin.com/technical/upgrades/segregated-witness/
