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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, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 23 2017, @08:09AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 23 2017, @08:09AM (#557892)

    I thought you only need 50% hashing power in order to control BTC? In that case the decentralization should be less than 58. Assuming the 58 companies all have the same hashing power, 35 of them already have more than 50% of the hashing power. Any asymmetry (and it is quite likely that their hashing power differs) can only reduce that number.

    So the decentralization of Bitcoin is at best 35, probably lower.

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