Segregated Witness (SegWit), also known as BIP 141, is expected to lock-in tomorrow August 8th or Wednesday August 9th on Bitcoin’s blockchain, Coin Telegraph reported.
An additional Bitcoin improvement proposal, known as BIP 91, was activated by the network on July 20.
BIP 91 was the first crucial step towards implementation of SegWit because the network is now set to automatically reject any blocks that are not signaling for SegWit (BIP 141) activation.
Once 95 percent of the blocks within a 2016 block difficulty adjustment period have signaled for Segregated Witness, the proposal to BTC will be locked in. Following the lock-in, there will be another 2016 block period for everybody on the network to upgrade their software before SegWit activates which will increase the block size limit on the blockchain by removing signature data from Bitcoin transactions. This, in turn, will allow “certain parts of a transaction to be removed,” with the goal to “free up space or capacity to add more transactions to the chain.”
In July, BIP 91’s activation required all miners to signal for SegWit or find their blocks rejected, the activation of Segregated Witness.
The SegWit proposal was first introduced by Blockstream co-founder Pieter Wuille at Scaling Bitcoin Hong Kong on 7th December in 2015. The alleged fix to Bitcoin’s blockchain to increase scalability and allow more transactions was called a turning point for the pioneer digital currency by technologist Andreas Antonopoulos.
This presentation marks a turning point for #bitcoin
Segregated Witness – #segwit https://t.co/H2AzBy6G8D
— Andreas (@aantonop) December 8, 2015
With the upgrade, Bitcoin will be updated to remove transaction malleability, an issue that enabled users to manipulate unconfirmed transactions, and increase the blockchain’s capacity.
The risks of a further split in Bitcoin’s blockchain and currency are now minimal according to Bitcoin Magazine, easing concerns that the Bitcoin blockchain could suffer another split like it did with Bitcoin Cash (BCH.)
All together these proposals could have created four different versions of Bitcoin – “148 Bitcoin,” “NewPoW Bitcoin,” “Bitcoin ABC,” as well as “Legacy Bitcoin.”
(Bitcoin ABC) was created on August 1st, which was nicknamed Bitcoin Cash, we avoided the other three splits – a truly historic moment for BTC.
There is also the New York Agreement, referred to as the “Silbert Accord” or “SegWit2x,” which plans to activate SegWit through BIP91.
Another proposal aims to block reject any blocks that do not signal readiness for BIP141, further pushing the implementation of SegWit.
The next event to watch in Bitcoin would be the actual activation of SegWit which is set to occur between late August to mid-September. Then you should keep your eyes peeled to the late November to mid-October hard fork implementation known as SegWit2x which we will discuss more in a later article and is a whole beast of its own to tackle.
Bitcoin seems to be holding strong at a current market cap of $54,863,214,264 and a high of $3326.20 up nearly (1.90%) from yesterday heading for that $4,000 milestone according to Coin Market Cap at the time of this writing.