Now we can talk about it officially: after a long and arduous journey activation Protocol Segregated Witness (SegWit) in the network of bitcoin took place. A historic moment occurred on 24 August 2017 at 01:57 UTC on the block 481,824 found a pool of BTCC.
A few moments after activating the Protocol author Peter Velle wrote in Twitter that he was the sender of the third SegWit-transaction:
Activation SegWit eliminated a number of problems standing in the way of bitcoin, as well as opening up opportunities for significant scaling of the network and the implementation of various innovative projects.
Among the main improvements, which can now count bitcoin in the first place, you should select a reorganization method of storing data in blocks, by which grows the network bandwidth, and removing the plasticity of the transaction, a problem which was literally a stumbling block for developers of projects based on the bitcoin blockchain.For ordinary users, the main advantages of the Protocol may be that over time should become cheaper transaction, and will also reduce the waiting time of their confirmation. This will be possible thanks to the increase of approximately 75% network throughput.
Also now the network bitcoin can safely be run Protocol Lightning Network is a solution designed to implement microtransactions that because of the high commissions themselves is simply not justified.In addition, it is worth noting one important fact: since SegWit was already present in the Litecoin, in the same way allowing Lightning-transaction, in the future we can hope for the implementation of atomic transactions using Lightning Network: two users can make instant and secure exchange BTC to LTC.
This, in turn, makes possible the emergence of effective decentralized exchanges, and gives you the opportunity to pay in LTC, even in those terminals where merchants will only accept BTC. In fact, we are talking about a decentralized analog ShapeShift.
Anyway, at this stage – everything is a question of the future. While we can say with confidence that at least one part of the drama around bitcoin scaling set point. Over whether the drama itself? Boring days in the world of cryptocurrency is not the case, and if you remember on the probability of hard forks SegWit2x in November, to talk about it is clearly not necessary.