The legend of the Bitcoin expansion plan "quarantine witness" will be to? A lot of wallets are poised to be ready.

Itcoin Core 0.13. Version 1 was released last week, which means miners will soon be able to start signaling support for the isolated witness (SegWit) soft fork solution. If activated successfully, the isolation witness has many benefits, one of which is to effectively increase the chunk size limit to about 1.6MB to 2MB-depending on the type of transaction included in the chunk.


If Segwit is activated on the Bitcoin network, users will be able to instantly increase their online trading capabilities if their wallets are ' ready to support Segwit '. Therefore, users want to experience the extra block space, to a large extent rely on the Bitcoin wallet provider. On GitHub, there are already 25 types of bitcoin wallets that say they will integrate Segwit.


What is the quarantine witness.


The isolation witness proposal was first proposed by Blockstream co-founder Pieter Wuille at the Hong Kong Symposium on December 7 to expand Bitcoin, which was praised by most people. The proposal has long been hailed by technical expert Andreas Antonopoulos as a "turning point", and the Bitcoin core developer, Greg Maxwell, also treats the proposal as a solution that can add four times times more capacity to the network in the short term.


The quarantine witness is probably the best way to solve the chunk size problem, which solves the problem of how some network variables calculate chunk size.


Bitcoin is a transaction in which one or more input fields are used to represent the source of funding, and one or more output fields are used to indicate the whereabouts of the funds, and the signature confirms the owner's ability to execute the transaction.
"The signature is now built into the transaction, and the signature in the quarantine witness is independent. ”


Tadge Dryja, developer of the Lightning Network (Lightning Networks), explains.


More specifically, the signature of the quarantine witness has been removed from the transaction and the data is entered into the trading base component Meckerschau (Merkle tree), or a generated transaction is entered. This change makes the transaction smaller on the current network node to allow more transactions to be included in the Bitcoin block, even if the block is still only 1MB in size according to the agreement.


Doug Roark, a developer, says:
"If the signature can add 0.75MB of capacity to chunks of 1MB size, then the chunk size will now be equivalent to 4MB"




This responds to the notion that Maxwell and Wuille have added 4 times times as much.




Outgoing status


Because the Segwit relies on the miners to signal to activate, in the fastest case, it will not be able to be activated on the Bitcoin network until mid-December. Therefore, to activate Segwit the fastest, bitcoin wallets have six weeks left to update their software.


The Bitcoin wallet vendors interviewed by Bitcoin Magazine are generally considered to have plenty of time. Some of them have even been prepared, and others have entered the final stages of preparation. Greenaddress, a bitcoin wallet vendor recently acquired by Infrastructure development company Blockstream, is one of those wallets that have completed the quarantine witness support preparation.


Developer Lawrence Nahum says that as long as the soft fork is deployed to the Bitcoin network, greenaddress users will be able to receive and send Segwit transactions immediately:
"I really want to be able to use the benefits of Segwit. I think Segwit can lead to better interchangeability and privacy, which I think is as important and even more important as scaling itself. The Segwit integration process is very simple. Desktop, iOS and Android: All of our wallets on GitHub Main branch have already supported Segwit. ”


Most of the other wallets interviewed by Bitcoin magazine also said that if the soft fork was activated, they would need to be prepared, at least not too backward.


The progress of some wallets
· Ciphrex's Msigna wallet and ledger hardware wallet have all been fully integrated segwit.


· Btc.com--blocktrail's predecessor, which is postponing consolidation, has recently been acquired by ASIC manufacturer bit continental, but says the consolidation should be completed in a matter of weeks.


· The well-known desktop and Android wallet Electrum will be integrated Segwit at the next release and is expected to be completed by the end of the year.


· Android and iOS wallet App--breadwallet are currently being tested and will be available to users once the network activates Segwit and is confirmed to be secure.


· Mycelium wallets say they have completed some of the complex integrations, leaving only a subset of user interface issues to be solved.






The increasing complexity


To be able to deploy the quarantine witness as a soft fork, the Bitcoin core developer chooses to set a signature data reference. While this does not make the solution unsafe, it increases the complexity of the Bitcoin database, but it does not add much to the wallet vendor.


Ruben de Vries is a btc.com developer and Bitcoinjsjavascript Library maintenance staff. At Btc.com, he is also a colleague of Thomas Kerin, the main maintainer of the Bitcoin PHP library. De Vries says:
"Bitcoin PHP has been ready for months, and Bitcoinjs is waiting for review and discussion because there are some backwards compatibility issues, but we'll be ready as soon as next week." For wallets, the technical changes are very small. See trade creation and signing alone, isolation witness adds some complexity, but not too much. In fact, only full-node developers and projects have to endure this complete complexity. ”




In general, wallet developers seem to think Segwit a little ' hacky '-but it's worth it. De Vries says:
"I think Segwit will be ' bitcoin 1.0 '; It fixes issues like ' beta Bugs '. ”


For Mycelium,daniel Weigl has completed most of the quarantine witness consolidation:
"In the world of Segwit, when a new developer learns bitcoin, he or she encounters many unfamiliar obstacles that cannot be explained if they do not know what the trade and chunks were like before Segwit was activated. This makes it harder for the new Bitcoin newcomers to get into the already very complex topic. However, I am not a supporter of hard forks. ”