Bitcoin Segregated Witness officially activated: a game changer or the beginning of a new round of competition?

Block height 481,824 is the time point when Bitcoin Segregated Witness is officially activated. As of press time, BTCC mining pool has mined the 481,824th block of the Bitcoin network.

With this, Bitcoin users can finally take advantage of this highly anticipated technology.

Looking back, this technical change may be the most time-consuming one in the history of Bitcoin software. As early as 2015, Bitcoin Core contributor Pieter Wuille first publicly proposed the concept of Segregated Witness (SW), and since then the community has been caught up in a political struggle.

Various conspiracy theories have been staged one after another. First, there was an accusation that the mining company Bitmain blocked Segregated Witness in order to increase mining profits. Later, major Bitcoin startups and miner groups united to launch their own expansion plan (SW2X). Then, users were dissatisfied with this expansion plan and supported the user-activated soft fork upgrade method.

And these mentioned dramas are not even half of what actually happened.

But in the end, Segregated Witness was implemented. Here are the key points of Segregated Witness:

1. It changes the way Bitcoin data is stored in blocks;

2. It increases block capacity while being compatible with past versions of Bitcoin software;

3. It removes the transaction malleability vulnerability, which was a major obstacle for many Bitcoin projects;

Removing barriers

The last point may be the biggest impact that Segregated Witness will have.

In fact, many developers believe that SegWit will drive the development of more forward-looking technologies that are necessary for Bitcoin to achieve mainstream adoption.

The most famous of these is the Lightning Network, which was first proposed in a white paper by developers Joseph Poon and Tadge Dryja in 2015. The idea of ​​payment channels, which take small transactions off the blockchain, could boost Bitcoin's transaction throughput to millions of transactions per second.

As SegWit finally activates on the bitcoin blockchain, some of the lightning networks built by developers will see better use, and they are working to ensure that these lightning networks can work with each other.

Other projects that require isolated witness are also proceeding in an orderly manner.

Some developers are working on the development of MAST (which will allow Bitcoin to implement more complex and large smart contracts), and some are developing schnorr signatures and TumbleBit (anonymous layer network) technology.

Ongoing political struggle

Although Segregated Witness is expected to bring a bright future to Bitcoin, its final implementation will not end the debate and political struggles that have existed within the community for many years.

Some Bitcoin users still believe that Segregated Witness was the wrong choice, and they are so convinced of this that they forked the Bitcoin blockchain and named the new chain Bitcoin Cash (BCC, which removed Segregated Witness).

Now, Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash (BCC) are in fierce competition.

The question now is: which cryptocurrency has the best technical roadmap? Which will attract more users and attention? Which chain will be more decentralized? Or, are both valuable?

The answers to these questions are uncertain, but one thing is certain, with Segregated Witness officially activated today, the community will be one step closer to getting an answer as to whether it can bring about a scaling effect.