A large number of Bitcoin wallets are ready to support Segregated Witness and are waiting for activation

Bitcoin Core 0.13.1 was released last week, meaning miners will soon be able to signal support for the Segregated Witness (SegWit) soft fork solution. If activated, SegWit will bring a number of benefits, one of which is that it will effectively increase the block size limit to between about 1.6MB and 2MB — depending on the type of transactions included in the block.

If SegWit is activated on the Bitcoin network, users will be able to increase the network's transaction capacity immediately - if their wallets are 'ready to support SegWit'. Therefore, whether users can experience the additional block space will largely depend on the Bitcoin wallet provider.

On Github, 25 Bitcoin wallets have indicated that they will integrate SegWit. To investigate their progress, Bitcoin Magazine interviewed some of these wallet providers.

Waiting state

Because SegWit relies on miners to signal its activation, it will not be activated on the Bitcoin network until mid-December at the earliest.

Therefore, Bitcoin wallets still have six weeks left to update their software to activate SegWit.

Bitcoin wallet providers interviewed by Bitcoin Magazine generally believe that there is enough time. Some of them are even ready, and some are in the final stages of preparation.

GreenAddress, a bitcoin wallet provider recently acquired by infrastructure development company Blockstream, is one of those wallets that has completed preparations for SegWit support.

Speaking to Bitcoin Magazine, developer Lawrence Nahum said that as soon as this soft fork is deployed to the Bitcoin network, GreenAddress users will be able to immediately receive and send SegWit transactions. After that, he plans to make improvements to the wallet to further take advantage of other possibilities offered by SegWit, such as MAST, Schnorr signatures, and the Lightning Network.

Nahum said:

“I’m very much looking forward to the benefits that SegWit has. I think SegWit can bring about better fungibility and privacy, which I think is just as important as scaling itself, if not more important.”

Regarding the preparations for SegWit itself, Nahum added:

“Integration was very simple. All of our wallets have SegWit support available in their master Github branches: Desktop, iOS and Android. We recently did some integration testing with a hardware wallet (Ledger) to make sure it all worked.”

Most of the other wallets Bitcoin Magazine spoke to also said they would need to be ready if the soft fork activates, or at least not too far behind. Ciphrex’s mSigna wallet and Ledger hardware wallet both have fully integrated SegWit. BTC.com — the predecessor of Blocktrail — is delaying integration due to its recent acquisition by ASIC manufacturer Bitmain, but they say the integration should be complete in a few weeks. Electrum, a popular desktop and Android wallet, will integrate SegWit in its next release, which is expected to be completed before the end of the year. BreadWallet, an Android and iOS wallet app, is currently in testing and will be available to users once the network activates SegWit and it is confirmed to be safe. Mycelium wallet says it has completed part of the complex integration and only has some UI issues to work out.

Payment processor Bitpay confirmed that they intend to integrate SegWit in its Copay wallet and the new Bitpay wallet, however, the company is taking a slightly more conservative approach. BitPay CEO Stephen Pair explained that they will only start integration after they confirm that the soft fork is activated.

“We do intend to support SegWit. The timeline for that support will depend on the activation of the soft fork. But we don’t know when it will be activated, so we don’t want to waste time now, what if it takes 6 months or even a year to activate?”

Growing complexity

In order to be able to deploy Segregated Witness as a soft fork, Bitcoin Core developers chose to set a signed data reference. Although this does not make the solution unsafe, it adds complexity to the Bitcoin database, but for wallet providers, the burden on them is not too much.

Ruben de Vries is a BTC.com developer and bitcoinjs JavaScript library maintainer. At BTC.com, he is also a colleague of Thomas Kerin, the main maintainer of the Bitcoin PHP library. de Vries said:

“Bitcoin PHP has been ready for months, BitcoinJS is awaiting review and discussion because of some backward compatibility issues, but we can have it ready as early as next week. For wallets, the technical changes are very small. Looking at transaction creation and signing alone, Segregated Witness adds some complexity, but not too much. In fact, only full node developers and projects have to endure this complete complexity.”

Generally, wallet developers seem to think SegWit is a little ‘hacky’ — but worth it. de Vries said:

“I think SegWit will be ‘Bitcoin 1.0’; it fixes a few issues, like ‘beta bugs’.”

For Mycelium, Daniel Weigl has already done most of the SegWit integration:

“In the world of SegWit, when a new developer learns Bitcoin, he or she will encounter many unfamiliar obstacles that cannot be explained without knowing what transactions and blocks looked like before SegWit was activated. This makes it even more difficult for new Bitcoiners to enter an already very complex topic. However, I am not a supporter of hard forks.”