Requisite Support for Bitcoin Segwit Update now seems Attainable

We can now hope that Bitcoin Network’s transaction capacity will be boosted in the very near future with SegWit technical update in place and it seems that it can attain the much required 95% support from the miners. With block 439,488 on the Bitcoin blockchain, miners are expected to upgrade  by changing a header value in the blocks that they create. Called Segregated Witness(SegWit), the technical update is going to carve out more space in each block and thereby fixing a major bug prevalent for a long time. Bitcoin Application Development Services are easily available nowadays for those businesses dealing specifically with Bitcoin exchanges.

What is Segregated Witness(SegWit)

Segregated Witness means cryptographic proofs and signatures used in bitcoin. So, it means separating the signatures from both the transaction data structure and the block data structure into their own separate datastructure.It is basically about taking the signatures out of the transaction datastructure.The main motive is to fix the transactional malleability.

The security intrusion is sometimes possible just because of the malleable signatures been found and it has already happened in the past many years. So, that made way for SegWit to appear. The most important development been made in SegWit update is that, now the signature has been taken out from the transactions making the whole process transparent. The transaction ID is not based on signature anymore.That simply means that transaction ID cannot be made malleable.

What Is Transaction Malleability

The access to make unauthorised changes in a cryptographic system is called malleability.Transactions are always signed but all the transactional data is not covered under the signature which covers around 75% of the total space in most of the transactions.

So, it might be possible that a node on the network would change a transaction to invalidate the hash associated and that creates concern among miners and bitcoin users. Moreover, it is possible that the signature for the transaction is itself malleable in nature.

Rebroadcasting a transaction with a different transaction ID also means the same. Transaction malleability had caused a lot of thefts and Bitcoin Exchange scams in the past and can also lead to service attacks on the network.

Advantages of SegWit

• It would allow for more transactions per block as it will decrease the amount of data required per transaction.

• Signatures will be eliminated from transactions under SegWit and that’s going to save a lot of space per transaction making it simple and less time-consuming.

Why It’s not Been Incorporated Till Now

The reason lies in the fact that an overhaul of the whole network will be required because the pattern of transactions has to be changed in a very significant manner as the signatures have to be removed from the present transaction pattern.

How to Change the Present Bitcoin Transaction Pattern

With Soft Fork trick been invented to address this issue, dozens of soft forks can be used in parallel to changing all kinds of scripting mechanism. Soft Fork is basically a variant of the Bitcoin protocol in which only the previous valid transactions/blocks will be made invalid. Because the old nodes are going to recognise the new blocks as valid, a soft-fork is backward compatible. Soft forks will only work If the majority of miners are going to upgrade.

Miners opposing the SegWit Update

It’s not that every single miner is supporting this technical update as there are a few exceptions which may hamper the path of reaching the figure of 95%. A few examples include ViaBTC and Bitcoin.com which are showing their clear intent against the update in their recent statements. The big problem is that they both combined contribute for 8% of Hashing Power making the chances grim for the update to be actualised.

On the other hand, Slush and BTCC are very eager to get the update incorporated as soon as possible. Bitcoin Core released a graph that shows the total estimated hashrate flagging support of SegWit at any given time (indicated by the red line).

Also Read : Yours Wallet For Bitcoin Micropayments

Bitcoin Services Application Development has been on rise for the past several years as its growth has been found three times of what had been five years ago. It’s further growth can easily be predicted as this decentralised platform for currency exchange is growing bigger with every passing day.