The popular cryptocurrency exchange is rolling out support for a technology that is expected to make transactions process more efficiently, improving the performance of Bitcoin. "Our engineering team has finished testing of SegWit for Bitcoin on Coinbase," the company wrote on its Twitter page Wednesday..
It makes key changes to how transactions are recorded on the blockchain, meaning a more efficient use of the data space in each block. Each block, processed every 10 minutes, is around one megabyte in size and adds data to the public blockchain about each transaction so it's public record..
What "SegWit" does is it segregates this witness data and compresses it down, so more transactions can fit in each block and the remaining uncompressed data is the essential details of the transaction. "No matter how much some people bash Coinbase, this is still great news for Bitcoin as a whole, and it will encourage further adoption," a Reddit user called Mufos said in the Bitcoin subreddit..
Bitcoin did not appear to move positively after the news, with the price of $10,715 down nine percent from the previous day. With just 14 percent of blocks using SegWit in recent days, Coinbase support could help change its fortunes..
https://www.inverse.com/article/41499-bitcoin-cryptocurrency-coinbase-segwit