Bitcoin miners begin signaling support for SegWit in a year

Bitcoin miners can now officially signal support for the SegWit scaling solution, thereby increasing the transaction capacity of the Bitcoin network.

With the mining of block 439,488, miners have been able to update their software by changing the header value in the blocks they process.

Segregated Witness (SegWit) is a way to expand the number of transactions on the bitcoin blockchain by carving out more space in each block, while also fixing a long-standing major bug and extending the software in other well-known ways.

With the SegWit code being incorporated into Bitcoin Core 0.13.1, 95% of miners will need to signal support for SegWit in the 2016 block series, or about two weeks. If successful, it will take another two weeks for SegWit to be officially activated.

If activated, the change would ripple out to bitcoin wallets and other parts of the software project, and network users would be able to start taking advantage of the update.

Not everyone supports SegWit, though (one observer even called the period of signaling support the start of a ‘dirty war’).

ViaBTC and Bitcoin.com, which have reiterated their intention to block SegWit in recent statements, together account for about 8% of the network’s hashrate, meaning that SegWit may not be able to reach the 95% threshold.

On the other hand, other mining pools have expressed their eagerness to update, with Slush having previously signaled support and BTCC stating that their pool is ready for SegWit.

Other mining pools may not be technically ready for SegWit yet.

F2Pool said in an email that they will not signal support ‘in the short term’ because their systems have not yet been upgraded to the required version of the C++ programming language.

Bitcoin Core recently published a chart that attempts to show the total hashrate support that SegWit has received.

According to the coded rules, miners have a one-year deadline to achieve the 95% threshold, meaning that Segregated Witness needs to be activated before around November 19, 2017, otherwise it will never be activated.