Topic: Post your SegWit questions here - open discussion - big week for Bitcoin! - page 31. (Read 84847 times)

But isn't transaction malleability a barrier to tracking? So much so that exchanges can't keep account and therefore want SegWit to remove that barrier?

The pools who have come out against Segwit have apparently seen declining hashrate. They had 8% before that. You do the math.

"no-one with any real stake in the network opposes it" - that one left me a bit confused, but thx for the answer

It doesn't exist yet, but I would suggest coming up with a different way to eliminate signature malleability. I doubt it will come to that in any case, the controversy is purely the invention of the trolls, no-one with any real stake in the network opposes it, as it's just common sense engineering.

What's plan b if segwit doesn't get adopted?

sry if repost

Not at all. Segwit does not make it any harder or any easier to track spends.

How much easier or harder does SegWit make transaction data mining and address tracking?

I don't claim to be any kind of expert either or even to know if important points are being left out of any kind of explanation... Nonetheless, I thought that the below linked about 11 minute video was decently basic, in regards to Seg wit.

https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/5eambr/segregated_witness_explained_with_thanks_to_luke/

Bitcoin transactions are like cheques: they need to be signed by the person who owns the bank account that the cheque is made from.

Bitcoin transactions do not accept handwritten signatures, however. They use digital signatures.



So.... the signature for a Bitcoin transaction can be (and are) used for multiple purposes. One purpose is to provide input to the calculation that creates the transaction ID number. This is a number that's used to quickly distinguish one transaction from another by the Bitcoin software.

The Bitcoin txid shares that characteristic with Bitcoin signatures: they can be used for different purposes apart from their basic purpose (serving as a unique identifier for transactions). Or I should say could be used. There is a problem. A bug.


The bug is that different signatures can be used for the exact same transaction. This is called "signature malleation". All versions of a given transaction are equally valid, miners accept them all.

And so, the problem is this: if one tries to use the txid for some other purpose, there is a risk that an attacker on the Bitcoin network could try to get a different version of your transaction (with an alternative signature) into the blockchain. If you're only sending a regular transaction without anything sophisticated that needs the txid and/or the signature to be what you intended, that's fine, and that's what Bitcoin has been like since the beginning.

But people have devised smart ways to use the txid for something else: Lightning being the obvious example. So......


Segwit takes the blocks and separates (segregates) the transaction data from the signature (witness) data. This prevents all remaining signature malleability attacks (there were other attacks that were fixed in previous soft forks). And that opens the door to all "2nd layer" Bitcoin networks, including Lightning, plus any currently unknown ideas that make use of un-malleable txid or signatures.

My question is how to explain segwit with using simple words, there is many technical analysis, explanations. Here in thread people mostly talk about supporting segwit and how to support it, will wallet's be updated for segwit.
My question is simple, what is SegWit, what this actually do? What we can gain with using SegWit? Is there some simple explanation for all this questions?

Nope, those using older clients will be creating legacy format transactions, and those transactions will be stored in the original block structure when mined.

doesn't this mean you can't do a rescan any longer if you're stuck with old version after segwit, the old version doesn't know  who is really allowed to spend the output?

Look closer. That was a double negative.

What I said was that 30% of the nodes on the network are running 0.13.1.  Currently it is 30.27%.

Now showing that 60 of the last 300 blocks signaled SegWit support (20%). 

Probably just the normal variation in who finds the blocks. The real number to look at is the signalling over 2016 blocks, the red line. That one is steadily increasing.

Why is segwit BIP9 version bit ( blockversion 00100000000000000000000000000010b, 536870914, 0x20000002)

signaling decreasing right now?



(Source: http://bitcoin.sipa.be/ver9-2k.png from 2016-11-20 21:44 UTC)

Actually there are already around 33% Segwit nodes ( NODE_WITNESS flag )  1777 of 5434

Why? Segwit brings many improvements to Bitcoin that we need, including scaling. Many wallets have or are in the process of implementing segwit.

Nodes that signal segwit have the NODE_WITNESS service bit set. So to check if a node supports segwit, just check for that service bit.

Segwit is backwards compatible. If you don't like segwit, you can continue to use Bitcoin as you do now with almost zero impact on you.

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Edit:
Hah. Whooops.

The best thing a non-miner can do to support the network and signal their support for SegWit would be to run Bitcoin Core 0.13.1.  You can see that currently 30% of the nodes on the network are running 0.13.1.
https://bitnodes.21.co/nodes/

You could also find a site that offers a voting mechanism to make your opinion heard.  Here's one for example: https://vote.bitcoin.com/arguments/segregated-witness-is-a-good-short-term-approach-to-scaling-bitcoin-capacity

Currently, 52 of the last 300 blocks (17%) signaled SegWit support, and 32 of the last 142 blocks (23%).  You can monitor progress here:
https://data.bitcoinity.org/bitcoin/block_version/7d?c=block_version&t=a

It would not be smart to not implement SegWit if/when it becomes part of the mainnet.

Some Bitcoin companies may however not "support" SegWit and would prefer that it not be implemented. My question is, how can a non-mining entity that is part of the Bitcoin economy and/or ecosystem show their support/non-support of SegWit? Even if an entity does not support SegWit they may prepare for SegWit in the event that it becomes part of Bitcoin despite their wishes.