Bitcoin wallet GreenAddress: Segregated witness deployment is not complicated

The Bitcoin block size debate has been in the spotlight lately, with the most notable development being the Segregated Witness solution, which was launched last week on its public testnet. This innovation was proposed by Blockstream co-founder Dr. Pieter Wuille and is set as the core of the Bitcoin Core development roadmap.

However, the expansion method based on Segregated Witness has recently been opposed by Bitcoin Classic. Compared with a Segregated Witness soft fork, Bitcoin Classic chose to deploy a "clean" hard fork to increase the Bitcoin block size to 2MB.

Regarding the issue of isolated witness, Jiang Zhuoer, founder of the Litecoin Mining Pool, mentioned in his recent article "Supporting 2MB and Opposing Forks with Consensus Below 90% of Computing Power":

“Core developers tried to use Segregated Witness (segwit) to indirectly achieve the expansion effect, but this has great problems and security risks.

First, when SegWit is used for 100% of single-signature transactions, it can only achieve a maximum expansion effect of 1.6MB. The complexity and huge development workload of SegWit make it difficult for other applications to update in a timely manner, or even unwilling to update. Assuming that 50% of transactions are used, it will take 6-12 months to achieve a 1.3MB expansion effect, which is meaningless.

Second, Segregated Witness has made a lot of changes to the underlying logic of Bitcoin. The development workload is huge and the risk level is high. Under the pressure of community expansion, Core development is bound to be rushed. Bitmain CEO Jihan Wu also confirmed at the party yesterday that "Core development is rushed for more than ten hours a day." Many Bitcoin users are technically skilled, and everyone knows the quality of the rushed code.

Bitcoin Magazine interviewed Lawrence Nahum, the developer of the GreenAddress wallet, who is currently implementing the Segregated Witness solution into the GreenAddress wallet.

“GreenAddress has already implemented some basic support on the SegWit testnet,” said Nahum. “We started this experiment because we think SegWit is a great enabler for trustless smart contracts, fixing the unintentional malleability problem, and making it possible for widespread multisig adoption to have lower fees, which is really exciting.”

Regarding the criticisms of SegWit, Nahum said:

“SegWit testnet support was relatively easy to set up, reading the technical details took me a few hours, and deploying it took a day. This includes running the wallet on the user's device, and running the server. The former is based on the wallet library bitcoinjs we use, and the latter is another library we wrote, PyCoin. It was not a big deal.”

Soft Fork vs Hard Fork

The biggest difference between the expansion methods chosen by Bitcoin Core and Bitcoin Classic is that the former chose to expand through the soft fork solution of Segregated Witness. According to the description of Bitcoin Core developers, Segregated Witness can be implemented with the support of miners only. Core developers believe that such a solution is a safer solution. However, the Bitcoin Classic development team believes that the risks of hard forks are exaggerated, and this simplest solution is more desirable.

In this regard, Nahum chose the former.

“The SegWit change wasn’t a lot of work, and it was a no-brainer compared to a contentious hard fork,” he said. “It’s really a win-win situation. A hard fork would have been hugely risky, especially if time was tight. Bitcoin Classic doesn’t seem to have a technical competitive advantage, it feels more like politics. It feels like a different, more centralized governance model. And that, in my opinion, makes me uncomfortable.”

He added: “As an entrepreneur, an investor, a developer, and a supporter of Bitcoin as a technology, I want long-term stability and consensus, not short-term or knee-jerk reactions. The future of this industry depends on innovation, and only with a cool head and a long-term vision can we see a successful future.”

What do you think?

Original article: https://bitcoinmagazine.com/articles/lawrence-nahum-bitcoin-wallet-greenaddress-already-integrating-segregated-witness-1453824522
By Aaron van Wirdum
Compilation: Overnight porridge
Source (translation): Babbitt Information (http://www.8btc.com/greenaddress-s…egated-witness)