Segregated Witness (Segwit)
| Segregated Witness, or SegWit, is a soft fork advancement to the Bitcoin network that aims to manage scalability issues by decreasing transaction times and increasing block size limits on its blockchain. SegWit was first proposed in 2015 by Bitcoin Core developer Pieter Wuille as a way to address Bitcoin’s then-growing scalability problem. At the time, the Bitcoin network was struggling to keep up with the increasing number of transactions being made on the blockchain, leading to longer transaction times and higher fees. SegWit works by separating the witness data from the transaction data in a Bitcoin transaction. This allows for more transactions to be stored in each block, without increasing the block size. SegWit also decreases the amount of data that needs to be verified in each transaction, which also speeds up transaction times. Since its launch in August 2017, SegWit has been adopted by a number of major Bitcoin wallets and exchanges, including Coinbase, Xapo, and Bitfinex. As of May 2018, SegWit is used by over 25% of all Bitcoin transactions. While SegWit has helped to improve Bitcoin’s scalability problem, it is not a perfect solution. SegWit does not increase the block size limit, which means that the Bitcoin network can still only process a limited number of transactions per second. There are also a number of other proposed solutions to Bitcoin’s scalability problem, such as the Lightning Network, which is still in development. |
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