After Months of Tests, the Bid to Finally Scale Bitcoin is Nearing Launch

By May 9, 2016Bitcoin Business

Since Segregated Witness was announced last December, it has been one of the most anticipated software releases across the bitcoin community. If it succeeds, the software patch could be the first step to growing the block size and scaling bitcoin.

Yet, due to the scope of the project and the long-term implications it could have for the $7bn network , the development team is moving carefully. Despite recent assurances that segwit would launch in April , the team continues to review the software well into May.

In an interview, Eric Lombrozo, CEO of Ciphrex and a spokesperson for Bitcoin Core, cautioned that there could be any number of unanticipated bugs that the team found, leaving the timeframe for when it launches up in the air. On top of the regular Core developers, Lombrozo said that independent developers have been tasked with trying to break the code as an extra precaution.

While Bitcoin Core is cautious not to launch prematurely, the team is pushing hard to complete the project as it provides an immediate block size increase. Lombrozo suggested that "with typical commonly used transaction types", users can expect an 1.8x capacity increase to Layer 1, the base layer of the bitcoin network.

However, segwit is much more than just a step towards scalability. Lombrozo explained that the update will also make it easier to implement future changes.

Lombrozo told CoinDesk: "Being able to deploy improvements to the protocol smoothly has been a difficult challenge in the past. With segwit we will also be able to do things like improve or replace the scripting language and build more sophisticated smart contracts." While it is true that scaling is highly anticipated, the capacity by which new rollouts can be implemented could have even greater implications for bitcoin down the line. Testing the framework

But, segwit […]

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