Crypto Frontline

The latest news that comes from coindesk.com point towards the fact that in the following days, the Bitcoin system will have an update that could potentially make it better.

What is SegWit?

SegWit is a soft fork change in transaction format of Bitcoin that basically enables the expansion of the block size. Initially, Satoshi Nakamoto, the creator of Bitcoin, had implemented a block size limit of 1 MB in order to prevent attacks using huge blocks. With this rule, huge blocks would have been instantly detected, preventing a malfunction of the system.

However, as Bitcoin became more popular and transaction number increased tremendously, the system became slow, since it takes 10 minutes for a block to be processed, due to the Proof-of-Work protocol.

Segwit solves that problem and manages to increase the size of a block to 1.8 MB.

Segregated Witness was implemented in August 2017 and by October around 10% of all network transactions were processed using SegWit. Besides the increase of the block limit, this new implementation increased the transaction speed.

Full SegWit support follows

The upcoming code release, named 0.16.0 is supposed to come with additional features for developers. The new version will be more structured and themed release, which is a little bit strange for the team of developers that is behind Bitcoin.

The sixteenth major code release aims to revolve around SegWit and its main focus is on facilitating the SegWit-style transactions from the software’s default wallet.

Andrew Chow, a major Bitcoin contributor stated: “The primary change is the addition of SegWit in the wallet. This lets users to easily create SegWit addresses.”

The new features had been added to the command line set but also to the wallet user interface, so programmers and non-programmers users can benefit from them.

This is good news for Bitcoin, which had been criticized in the last few month for its slow network. It takes a lot of time for a block to be created, which delays the transaction processing. The fees are the highest in the market, which makes other cryptocurrencies more appealing. From a competitive point of view, these new changes help Bitcoin to keep up with the other rivals.