After several years of infighting in the Bitcoin community, we have made it to where we are today.
1. SegWit finally activated.
2. Proponents of larger blocks fed up with Bitcoin Core developers moved on to Bitcoin Cash
3. The hard fork to Bitcoin 2x which would have increased the blocksize to 2mb while implementing SegWit never happened.
Though SegWit wasn't ever supposed to be the end-all victory in scaling Bitcoin, it did provide some much needed changes in the way that transactions are included in blocks and, by that alone, would free up some extra space in each block to include more transactions
Those using sites like Coinbase, Blockchain.info and Bitpay, might have noticed that they are still using the old address format from when before SegWit activated. For many this is quite annoying that after the many before SegWit gained consensus and then even more time before it actually became active on the network, some of the major players in the space still have not upgraded their processes to implement the new feature.
This prompted Alan Silbert to reach out to Coinbase for a timeline
That’s great but how about some transparency on your #SegWit timeline ??
Alan Silbert (@alansilbert) December 4, 2017
to which Coinbase responded with:
We're working on SegWit support and will have a public update soon.
Coinbase (@coinbase) December 4, 2017
Great news! Things are in the works! The network upgrade which has been discussed for years now and was passed after much deliberation is in the pipeline!
Not so much
Just the next day Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong tweeted this in response to a poll asking if Coinbase "should upgrade to Segwit" :
Open to it! Kind of a lot going on right now :) Engineers who are interested in helping us launch SegWit plz apply here https://t.co/zGdUzxSAz3
Brian Armstrong (@brian_armstrong) December 5, 2017
Kory, what do you think about bitcoin cash implementing 8mb with the lightning network. Do you think this is the best way to scale bitcoin? Or would you say sticking with bitcoin segwit will be beneficial?
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Hey itai0921! Thanks for the response!
Good question. While in theory a big block size + lightning might be the most obvious choice to scale a network, the best choice isn't always the most obvious one. I am not too sure, time will tell if that is the best strategy. It certainly would be interesting if Bitcoin Cash ever implemented lightning though. They do have quite awhile to go before they even need to think about off chain scaling, although it doesn't sound like any of the prominent Bitcoin Cash people (Ver, Wright, etc) are interested in any sort of off chain scaling.
Also:
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