@funkenstein - would you elaborate on this "woodcutters signaling, and people using, segregated witness transactions" in layman's terms please? I am not that technical.
Hi Pokeytex, well it is a long story, sorry. And one without a conclusion at this point.
Basically what "segwit" refers to is two new types of transaction, in addition to the types we have already. Mostly we have today Pay-To-Pubkey-Hash (pay to a standard bitcoin address) transactions, but also possible are Pay-To-Pubkey transactions. There are also Pay-To-Script-Hash transactions, which enable multisignature functionality. For an interesting review as of 2014, see this survey of the bitcoin blockchain:
http://www.quantabytes.com/articles/a-survey-of-bitcoin-transaction-typesThe new types in "segwit" are referred to as pay-to-witness-public-key-hash and pay-to-witness-script-hash if you want to look them up. There are a couple of advantages to these TX types. One is that they allow for an elimination of transaction-ID-malleability, which enables certain implementations of payment channels and sidechains. Another is that they take up less space.
This would be all well and good, if they were cleanly back-compatible like the other new transaction types have been.
For example if you are using bitcoin 0.5.3, which doesn't have multisig P2SH transactions implemented, you can still sync to the chain. P2SH transactions just look nonstandard but still verify as valid and don't cause a conflict in the block chain.
HOWEVER, one of the new transaction types in segwit looks like an "anyone-can-spend" transaction to an older client. This means that a chain split is possible. One miner verifying with older software might let somebody spend these, whereas the newer software being run by another miner wouldn't let that transaction go through. This means there is a fundamental disagreement over what is the blockchain, which is bad (TM) (R).
People are generally scared of any kind of forking in the consensus mechanism, and so segwit transactions have not appeared on any highly valued blockchain. However there is a "signalling" mechanism that allows miners to publicly state that they are willing to start confirming these new transactions. When a certain level of support is signalled, we will relax a little bit, the transaction type will be enabled, and maybe people will start using them.
Currently some miners of bitcoin and litecoin are signalling that they support this "soft-fork", but not a majority. It is only a soft fork because non-mining users wouldn't have to update to validate segwit transactions.
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I have not gone through the segwit code in detail nor done testing personally on the segwit-enabled-bitcoin-testnet. My purpose here is not to promote segwit transations, though the idea seems sound and potentially useful as well as being recommended by many developers I respect. My purpose is rather to make the option available, and to point out that woodcoin is ready for this should woodcutters (and LOG users) desire it. It has no fundamental conflict with the logarithmic release schedule nor our other unique features.
That's my understanding, likely incomplete, and hence my request for comments from all y'all. Hope that helps!
Recommended reading:
http://achow101.com/2016/04/Segwit-FUD-Clearup