At approximately 00:06:48 UTC July 20th at block #476768 the bitcoin network finished the BIP91 lock-in period and entered the next phase in order to activate the protocol Segregated Witness (Segwit). During the lock-in period, there will be another 336 blocks, until Segwit will be activated on Bitcoin’s main network. Which will bring Bitcoin to it's next level.
Most likely Segwit will see implementation in the Bitcoin network. Miners have reached today the 80% threshold and held this position for 336 blocks to initiate the current lock-in. To activate the Segwit protocol another period of blocks mined at this threshold must take place in order to let the protocol activate itself. The market reacted strongly to the most likely Segwit lock-in, Bitcoin rallied from a price of $2300 per BTC yesterday, to a short high of $2930 today.
What is the Segregated Witness Protocol
The Segregated Witness protocol (Segwit) was introduced in 2015 by bitcoin developer Pieter Wuille. The implementation of this protocol a mechanism that relocates witness inputs away from transactions which in turn may create more block space. The full nodes will validate the blocks, but with a seperate entry for signature data. Because this specific data is removed, there will be more free block size space available. Many miners did not agree with this solution in the past and they asked for a bigger block size. So Bitcoin came up with a solution to increase the block size from 1MB to 2MB if the miners would support them in the current Segwit protocol.
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