Does anyone think this is a good idea? I guess now that
Bitcoin Cash is integrating Segwit (native Segwit address and signature scheme, with plans to implement a near-identical malleability fix), and Segwit2x is providing 8MB blocks, they need something to differentiate their network from the other 2 Bitcoin forks. Is that what this is about?
I sort of wish the Segwit2x fork would be called off, so that the market could decide between BTC and BCH.
Glad to see Alste is back..... I guess that means this rally still has some steam left.
you should also ask to bitcoin cash devs rather than forming an opinion based only on gregory maxwell's opinion.
the main thing of segwit is that witness data is stored on a separate data structure from the one used to store base data (see
https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0141.mediawiki for more datails). Just for the sake of clarity this is the relevant part taken from of BIP 141:
This BIP defines a new structure called a "witness" that is committed to blocks separately from the transaction merkle tree. This structure contains data required to check transaction validity but not required to determine transaction effects. In particular, scripts and signatures are moved into this new structure.
The above is the essential part of SegWit and this is the reason why is called segregated (separate) witness.
Cash implementations will not adopt this hack to increase the block size simply because they don't need it, the block size limit has been removed already on August 1st.
BIP 143 is just an new digest algorithm for signature verification and it could be applied to any kind of transactions be them witness or regular.
WRT of maxwell's allusion to mis-attribution/appropriation of Core code in the case of BIP 143, it is pure fantasy. These are the two commits that implements the new signature scheme described in BIP 143:
db236b5a6e2f6cf67d194f86f178584fa99b3ca71f50d97ef1885bdb09ea5ae403385fac23bf7276as you can see both mention BIP 143 as the original specification. BIP 143 is even specified in the original
bitcoin cash specification.
as for the 'sigsafe' maxwell mentioned in the post you mentioned I really don't know where he finds it cause it never existed in the first place.
one last thing related to BIP 173. this is just a new way to encode a bitcoin pub key that use a base32 encoding rather than a base58, also known as "Bench32". This scheme has been already used to produce the id of tor and i2p hidden services. wuille and maxwell along with other core devs add nice features on top of it, but again this has nothing to do with SegWit, and of course the code that is going to implement BIP 173 for cash clients will attribute the paternity of the idea to BIP 173 authors.
WRT the fact the bitcoin cash client are going to call it "cashaddress" this is just plain false, such string will be probably use as a prefix for the address format and won't be a way to "rename" the idea. Bitcoin core will use 'bc' instead as prefix but is not they are going to change the name of the "Bench32" into "bc".