4

Are the bullet points below still valid?

  • We understand that SegWit continues to be developed actively as a soft-fork and is likely to proceed towards release over the next two months, as originally scheduled.
  • We will continue to work with the entire Bitcoin protocol development community to develop, in public, a safe hard-fork based on the improvements in SegWit. The Bitcoin Core contributors present at the Bitcoin Roundtable will have an implementation of such a hard-fork available as a recommendation to Bitcoin Core within three months after the release of SegWit.
  • This hard-fork is expected to include features which are currently being discussed within technical communities, including an increase in the non-witness data to be around 2 MB, with the total size no more than 4 MB, and will only be adopted with broad support across the entire Bitcoin community.

  • We will run a SegWit release in production by the time such a hard-fork is released in a version of Bitcoin Core.

  • We will only run Bitcoin Core-compatible consensus systems, eventually containing both SegWit and the hard-fork, in production, for the foreseeable future.

  • We are committed to scaling technologies which use block space more efficiently, such as Schnorr multisig.

https://medium.com/@bitcoinroundtable/bitcoin-roundtable-consensus-266d475a61ff#.8vbwu3ft7

1 Answer 1

3

The full code for Segregated Witness was released on 19th of April, which to the letter fulfills the requirement. However, apparently some people had understood the first point to mean that it would be in production in April which was not the case.

Following the above, an implementation for a hard-fork would be expected to be delivered by 19th of July.

IIRC, Bitmain's Jihan Wu has recently stated that point 4 is to be interpreted as them requiring the code for a blocksize increase hardfork to have been merged into Bitcoin Core before they run Segregated Witness in production. This is of course a much stronger requirement than point 2 and point 4 which could be read as them starting to use SegWit at the latest when code for a hardfork is released.

The argument has also been made that by allowing voting for Classic, some pools have breached point five. The disagreement here is chiefly about whether Classic constitutes an incompatible version. Until a Classic node activates, it follows the same rules, so proponents argue it is compatible. Yet, since Classic breaks with the current rules as soon as it activates, others declare it to be not "Bitcoin Core-compatible".


Altogether, it seems to me that there are still a lot of misunderstandings and conflicts of interest to be ironed out. Vastly diverging priorities and language barriers add to the difficulties. There also seem to be very different assumptions about where the community support lies and how the power dynamics in Bitcoin will work out.

As far as I can tell, we can only wait and see how the situation develops. The next step appears to be the imminent inclusion of Segregated Witness into the next Bitcoin Core release candidate. Once some miners start signaling readiness for Segregated Witness, the situation will probably evolve quickly.

Your Answer

By clicking “Post Your Answer”, you agree to our terms of service and acknowledge you have read our privacy policy.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged or ask your own question.