Summary
User Activated Segregated Witness to happen on August 1st.
Miners may hard fork after 12 hours of Segwit.
Investors will own two coins if hard fork happens.
Long term Investors are advised to move their bitcoins from exchanges to personal wallets like hardware wallets or paper wallets.
This article aims to explain the chain of events that happened and going to happen in bitcoin space. Let me start with few basics so that for the benefit of non tech savvy long term investors. Though some of the terms mentioned below are technical, it is highly desirable for long term investors to understand to make their conviction about bitcoin more stronger.
Bitcoin transaction basics
A bitcoin transaction tells the bitcoin blockchain network that the owner of the bitcoin has authorized the transfer of bitcoin to another owner. The new owner can now spend these bitcoins by creating another transaction that authorizes transfer to another owner, and so on, in a chain of ownership. So in nutshell bitcoin transactions are nothing but creating a chain of ownership as the value of bitcoin is moved from address to address.
Exponential growth of bitcoin transactions
If we look at the 2 year graph on the number of transactions on bitcoin we would get a better understanding. In 2010, the number of transactions per block was below 50. In 2015, the number of transactions registered in a block was in a range of 650 to 800 transactions. Till then it has grown exponentially and in May 21, 2017, the number of transactions in a block reached an all time high of 2218.
SegWit-An Idea by Dr. Pieter Wuille
Every transaction in bitcoin network contains an input address from where the value is coming, an output address to where the value is going and a digital signature to verify the authenticity of the transaction. This digital signature associated with each transaction is taking 65% of the space in a given transaction. Another problem by associating digital signature with transaction data is that the signature can be tampered to change the transaction id and later claim for refund. Dr. Pieter Wuille suggested solution to this problem by segregating the digital signature from the transactions data.