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posted by Fnord666 on Tuesday August 22 2017, @09:16PM   Printer-friendly
from the get-yer-bitcoins-here dept.

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

During the month of November 2017, approximately 90 days after the activation of Segregated Witnesses in the Bitcoin blockchain, a block between 1MB and 2MB in size will be generated by Bitcoin miners in a move to increase network capacity. At this point it is expected that more than 90% of the computational capacity that secures the Bitcoin network will carry on mining on top of this large block.

The upgrade to 2MB blocks has been agreed first during the Bitcoin Roundtable Consensus in Hong-Kong on February 2016, and then ratified by the Bitcoin Scaling Agreement in New York on May 2017. These agreements stipulate the activation of Segregated Witness support and an increase of the maximum base block size from 1MB to 2MB.

Segregated Witness support has been locked-in as a soft fork expected to activate around August 23 2017 (block height 481,824). Bitcoin clients that are not currently SegWit-compatible and wish to benefit from the new type of transaction must perform extensive upgrades to various subsystems, including changes to transaction serialization, signature hash computation, block weight calculation, scripting engine, block validation, a new address scheme, and P2P protocol upgrades. Fortunately Segregated Witness compatibility is opt-in, and existing Simplifed Payment Verification (SPV) wallets and full nodes are expected to continue working without changes after SegWit activates.

Be prepared.

Source: https://segwit2x.github.io/segwit2x-announce.html


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  • (Score: 2) by JNCF on Wednesday August 23 2017, @12:00AM (2 children)

    by JNCF (4317) on Wednesday August 23 2017, @12:00AM (#557777) Journal

    Now, Bitcoin Legacy and Bitcoin2x will have identical transaction formats, so a transaction will be valid on both chains. That is going to cause a royal fuck up.

    That should be trivial to prevent with a given pile of coins, so it only affects those ignorant of it affecting them; the blockchain they know about will work as expected. For the informed, bonus coins! Somethingsomethingmeritocracysomethingsomething...

    Starting Score:    1  point
    Karma-Bonus Modifier   +1  

    Total Score:   2  
  • (Score: 3, Informative) by Snow on Wednesday August 23 2017, @02:23AM (1 child)

    by Snow (1601) on Wednesday August 23 2017, @02:23AM (#557818) Journal

    It will take some time before you can split your coins safely and reliably. Even once you are able to, I think it's going to be a pain in the ass.

    In any case, this will cause people to lose money. Bitcoin is supposed to be safe.

    It looks like it's going to happen though, so buckle up :)

    • (Score: 2) by JNCF on Wednesday August 23 2017, @11:36AM

      by JNCF (4317) on Wednesday August 23 2017, @11:36AM (#557923) Journal

      It will take some time before you can split your coins safely and reliably. Even once you are able to, I think it's going to be a pain in the ass.

      Nah, it'll be easy. Here's one example, probably not the cleverest. Given that chain A is significantly longer than chain B, and chain A has a block height of X, we can write a transaction whose outputs can be spent using a signature from one key if the block height is greater than or equal to X, OR another key regardless of height. We sign and propagate a transaction for chain A using the first key, and we know it can't be included in chain B yet. Once chain A has verified our transaction we sign a transaction for chain B using the second key, and we know it can't be spent on chain A because the funds have been moved to a different output already.

      In any case, this will cause people to lose money. Bitcoin is supposed to be safe.

      Yeah, I don't actually think that's a good thing. I don't think Bitcoin is ready for mainstream adoption, either.