Bitcoin Community Overwhelmingly Backs SegWit to Solve Capacity Challenge
The digital currency has been growing in popularity, with more companies gradually accepting payment in Bitcoin. However, in order for Bitcoin to become a payment system on par with rivals it needs to up how many transactions can be made.
At the moment, the digital currency can support just seven on-blockchain transactions per second, compared to PayPal processing around 100 and Visa around 4,000 in the same timeframe. With several options to solve the growing problem, which has led to transaction fees increasing, the debate around what should be done has escalated.
Over 1,000 CoinJournal readers made their opinion known through a survey, with more than seven in ten backing SegWit. The drastically increased capacity that such a move could offer certainly appeals to Bitcoin users but it has other advantage too, including linear scaling of sighash operations, script versioning, and improved security.
Support for SegWit reflects the decision made by various Bitcoin companies and miners to support the concept of a user-activated soft fork at the Consensus 2017 conference.
Oliver Carding, founder of CoinJournal, said: “I am not surprised by the overwhelming support for Segregated Witness, a proposal backed by a dedicated and skilled team and one that will allow for the introduction of several new features to Bitcoin. It will be interesting to see how the recent agreement during the 2017 conference impacts the Bitcoin scalability debate and how the changes reflect the latest survey findings.”
SegWit’s main contender – Bitcoin Unlimited – gained far less traction in CoinJournal’s survey, receiving just 18 percent of votes. However, the publication noted that it can be difficult to measure the true support among Bitcoin’s userbase. CoinJournal publishes the latest stories and information on cryptocurrency, acting as an essential, unbiased resource.
