The long-lasting block size dispute has catapulted into the center of attention again. One of the most talked-about developments is Segregated Witness, of which a public testnet iteration was launched last week. The innovation as recently proposed by Blockstream co-founder and Bitcoin Core developer Dr. Pieter Wuille is a centerpiece of a scalability “ roadmap ” set out by Bitcoin Core.
To find out where the broader development community stands on Segregated Witness, Bitcoin Magazine reached out to library and wallet developers, those who will need to do the heavy lifting in order to utilize the innovation once rolled out.
In part 6 of this series: Electrum developer Thomas Voegtlin.
Segregated Witness Highly Supportable
Electrum – a hybrid model of light clients for end users and full node servers run by hosts – is one of the most-used wallets in the Bitcoin ecosystem today; according to Voegtlin’s estimations, his software processes up to 10 percent of all Bitcoin transactions. The developer has started experimenting with the Segregated Witness testnet, and will try to integrate it into his wallet once rolled out on the Bitcoin network.
Speaking to Bitcoin Magazine, Voegtlin said: “I like Segregated Witness because it makes Bitcoin cleaner, by separating transaction data from script data. That separation has the benefit of finally removing transaction malleability, which is much needed. It also opens the door for future extensions of the scripting language, enabling all sorts of new use cases. And of course, I’m favorable to an increase in the network capacity.” The developer believes that the added effort to integrated Segregated Witness is within acceptable range.
“It will be very easy to support transacting to Segregated Witness addresses,” Voegtlin explained. “But to really support Segregated Witness, we need to change address generation in the wallet, and the way transactions are signed. The […]
