Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by nadaviv 3409 days ago
But SegWit is a block size increase. It allows twice as many on-chain transactions by making the blocks twice as big.

This "SegWit vs block-size increase" talk makes no sense to me.

https://segwit.org/is-segwit-a-block-size-increase-705df6a87...

1 comments

The block size increase with segwit is marginal and a side effect. It's a complicated feature that is meant for purposes other than block size increase. Don't obfuscate the issue. I'm talking about a simple tweaking of a parameter to increase block size.
> The block size increase with segwit is marginal

It's not marginal. According to the mix of current transactions on the bitcoin network, SegWit gives us an effective block size of 2.1MB. Over 2 times more transactions compared to today, which is more than what Bitcoin Classic was pushing for until not too long ago.

https://www.weusecoins.com/eli-segwit/

https://segwit.org/is-segwit-a-block-size-increase-705df6a87...

> and a side effect.

Indeed it is! The main goal of SegWit is fixing the malleability problem, everything else is an bonus.

The other bonuses are pretty awesome themselves, too:

https://bitcoincore.org/en/2016/01/26/segwit-benefits/

> I'm talking about a simple tweaking of a parameter to increase block size.

A "simple" block-size increase requires an hard-fork, which is anything but simple. Hardforks requires a network-wide coordinated upgrade where everyone updates on the same time, at the risk of a currency split and old nodes being open to attacks if not everyone upgrades in time. Hardforks are highly risky and very very slow to deploy safely.

I recently presented some slides on this topic, the relevant part starts here:

https://www.docdroid.net/TouvFPl/embassy-future-politics-feb...

The same slides, shown as a summary image: https://twitter.com/TraceMayer/status/829558034351398916