non riesco a decidermi se e' una figata o una super pezza (anche se propendo piu' per la seconda ....)
The segregated witness solution
Segregated witness is perhaps best described as a novel workaround to the block size issue that affects how certain network variables are counted toward block size.
In bitcoin, transactions include one or more input fields showing where the funds come from, one or more output fields indicating where they’re going and a signature that validates that the owner had the ability to execute the transaction.
"Now signatures go into the 'from' field," Lightning Network developer Tadge Dryja explained. "[In segregated witness] the signature is separate."
More specifically, segregated witness takes the signature out of the transaction and puts the data into a Merkle tree in the coinbase component of the transaction, or the input of a generated transaction. This change would make transactions appear smaller to current nodes on the network, so that more could be included in a bitcoin block, even if blocks are still limited to 1MB by protocol rules.
“If the signatures would add 0.75MB [of capacity] to a block to a 1MB block, it would now be equivalent to 4MB,” developer Doug Roark said, echoing the description put forth by Maxwell and Wuille.
Dryja noted that a soft fork would mean parties running older versions of Bitcoin Core could still use bitcoin, even if it would appear to them as if users were sending money without signatures.
“Nodes today only see the transaction Merkle root and the transaction data, which today includes the signature,” David Vorick, CEO of distributed storage startup Nebulous, explained. “If segregated witness were to be implemented, today’s nodes would not see the transaction signature data, because it would be in a storage area that they don’t recognize.”
Older nodes that have not updated their software would still however be able to monitor the network, though it would appear as if certain parties are behaving abnormally.
"[In a soft fork] nothing changes, my coins are still the same, which is different than everyone must upgrade their software or it stops working," Dryja said. "Things start looking really weird, but they can ignore these transactions."