Topic: SegWit, Industry standard for the future? - page 2. (Read 575 times)

Ah, at last some sound advice to steer this issue in the right direction. I already had some small problems with people using different applications to verify signatures for the different formats. It would be nice if there were trusted software made available to verify signatures for all of these formats.

People are currently using questionable applications to do this and it is causing some confusion. 

The best practice currently is to give people P2SH SegWit addresses when people are paying you, but to support/allow sending to bech32 addresses when you're paying people. bech32 addresses are strictly superior except for issues of backward-compatibility, so eventually everyone will switch over, but it'll probably take a few years; it shouldn't be a format war situation unless someone decides that they hate bech32 and come up with a totally new alternative.

I wouldn't phrase it as 'singled out'. By default Core 0.16.0 will give you a '3' Segwit address and you have to specify if you want to have a bech32 address instead. The most important thing is that Core will now let people send to bech32 addresses. So hopefully, that will lead to all the services allowing withdrawal to all address types and everyone will be able to choose which they use.

The reason for Segwit is that the increasing popularity of Bitcoin caused overloads on the platform, hence the key requirements from millions of users was an update that would enhance speeds while at the same time reducing transaction costs,, so it is mostly a patch for Bitcoin itself.
SegWit aims to enhance transactions speed by removing some of them from the main network. The update was finalized in August and has been under testing, which came to an end on 26th February: Full Support for SegWit - Crucial Milestone in Bitcoin’s History

Looking at your response to RNC and myself, I should say that you should just take a chill pill, because you seem to be very tightly strung there. ^hmmmmm^

The problem is, we do not need different services using different formats all over the place. I see with the latest Bitcoin Core 0.16.0 that was released, they sort of singled out Bech32, so I reckon that is the way things are going to now. 

This means I have to switch to wallets that use Bech32 or hope that my wallet provider makes the switch soon. 

Yeah, right... Roger Ver and Craig Wright will scale the decentralised crypto by introducing gigabyte blocks and hiring people to change the constants in the code for them

You don't know what you're talking about, man.



You can use whichever standard you find suitable - they all work and none of them will stop working.
How is it complicated? What is your problem?

Until now, SegWit has not been widely adopted. The other day I did a transfer through Shapeshift with Electrum, and for whatever reason the SegWit address on Electrum wasn't accepted by Shapeshift. When I attempted to deposit these coins on an exchange the fees were still high since the exchange didn't adopt SegWit.

I look at this situation the same as Python 2 vs Python 3, which if you are a programmer you would know is problematic. Python 3 is technically more advanced yet everyone is too lazy to re-write their programs to adopt it, and most of the useful scientific utilities of Python remain on Python 2. Even if a lot of libraries are migrated, there is always that essential, small library that you need somewhere that is only available on python 2, every single time.

Same story with SegWit. You can use it for a transfer here or there between two parties that have adopted it, but most exchanges, transfer services and BTC purchasing links on websites are just too lazy or lack awareness to implement SegWit. Look at Steam, rather than adopting SegWit they simply discontinued BTC due to the high transaction costs, not thinking a simple solution was in front of them. Most developers don't have time for non-backward compatible changes and quite simply will not bother implementing them. We can learn this lesson from programming languages. This is the reality - SegWit has the very real chance of being the Python 3 in crypto, even years from now it risks failing to be widely adopted.

Hopefully this is a lesson to never break backwards compatibility, ever, especially with wallet addresses. It's surprising the core team didn't learn this lesson looking into the history of programming.

Segwit is just a sticking plaster for a system that won't scale on-block so never mind talk about becoming an industry
standard in the future because crypto has moved on and will leave Bitcoin dead in its tracks.

breaking backward comparability is a big NO NO in development circles and software developers are not going to keep
on changing code in wallets just to keep Bitcoin alive when clearly from a development perspective its days are now numbered.

 

This is my understanding too. Bech32 addresses are called "native SegWit", and have a larger effect on transaction size than the more compatible 3-addresses.

It took me long enough to remember Bech32, I'm not even trying to remember P2SH, P2WSH and P2WPKH. If I can't be bothered to remember, less tech savvy people won't care for sure.
Luckily, Bitcoin Core is quite conservative, and changes like this only happen about once per decade.

As I understand it the end goal is bech32 addresses for Segwit and the other implementation is indeed meant to be tempory. That's the reason I've gone straight to using bech32 on Electrum. That also allows me to keep a legacy wallet that I can use until everyone catches up and I can withdraw to the bech32 wallet from all services.

A lot of people are moving over to SegWit now. The big question is, which implementation is going to be the standard in the future?

We currently have P2SH addresses or Bech32 addresses    Also looks like there are bech32 P2WSH addresses & bech32 P2WPKH addresses. Bloody confusing!

This reminds me of the days when we had a VHS and Betamax videotape format war, way back then.

I find that even signing a message with a SegWit address is still a bit problematic, because different applications handle this differently, based on the format you used.   See this topic : https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/about-possibility-to-sign-messages-in-segwit-address-in-future-2885058


Why are we making things so complicated or is this just a temporary solution to push SegWit quicker into mainstream use? Please share your experience and which implementation you used and why you chose to go that route.