In a clearly stated analysis and opinion blog post about the costs and benefits of doing either a hard fork to a 2 MB block size limit versus going with the “Hong Kong Compromise” Segregated Witness ( Segwit ) upgrade, Sam Cole offers the perspective from that of a Bitcoin miner in what options lie ahead.
From a pragmatic perspective, Cole gives a very clear explanation of how the Segwit solution is the much safer, simpler and easier one and all of the potential risks of failure and negative disruption that the hard fork has. However, it’s clear from Cole’s post that he believes there’s actually too much currently at stake to not take the risks associated with the hard fork.
From a development, testing and deployment process, Cole makes his argument clear that the Segwit soft fork is a lot more straightforward for everyone involved except for the developers involved with interacting with Bitcoin wallets. It’s voluntary to implement it, but it cannot be tested until it’s been activated. He believes that this will result in miners taking a very long time to implement Segwit because they’ll want to be sure of its effects on their systems.
From a developer’s perspective, the hard fork is a lot simpler and as long as it’s done carefully and in sync with the entire network, it can have much more impact on the problems that Bitcoin is facing.
As far as potential impacts and likely impacts, Cole really draws a line in the sand on where he sees the most benefits coming from. With Segwit being a voluntary soft fork, the benefits throughout the network will likely be negligible until there’s a mass adoption of it. Cole doesn’t see this adoption happening any time soon based on the timelines of “many months” it took […]
