Understanding SegWit: A Comprehensive Overview of the Technology

In the fall of 2015, Pieter Wuille, a developer for Bitcoin-Core and Blockstream, presented the Segregated Witness (SegWit) concept at the Scaling Bitcoin conference in Hong Kong. This innovative idea aimed to improve the scalability and adaptability of the blockchain by separating the witness part of the data from the basic part of the transaction.

The witness part, which contains a cryptographic code (signature), had been a problem for the blockchain. It could only be changed after appearing in the block, complicating new transactions. SegWit addresses this issue by removing the signature with witness data from the block, helping to increase the bandwidth of the entire network.

James Hillard, an engineer from Bitmain, was instrumental in the development of SegWit. He owns the code for BIP91, a combination of the proposals of Core developers and opponents of SegWit. Luke Dashjr, another developer from Bitcoin-Core, insisted on holding a SegWit without a hard fork.

Charlie Lee, the creator of Litecoin, was one of the first to implement SegWit in the Litecoin network in May 2017. The current acceptance of SegWit in the Bitcoin community remains widespread, as it is a protocol upgrade aimed at improving scalability by removing certain data from main blocks, thus reducing transaction sizes and increasing network capacity.

The introduction of SegWit began due to the problem of "transactional plasticity error" in the network, which was discussed by Gregory Maxwell, another developer from Bitcoin-Core and BlockStream, in 2012. Shaolinfry An, an anonymous developer, proposed a compromise solution to the UASF, the provisions of which were then used to sign the New York Agreement.

The implementation of SegWit can significantly improve the Bitcoin network. It eliminates options for changing the transaction signature by a third party, simplifying the development of new smart contracts. It also increases blockchain throughput, reduces fees, makes software forks easier, improves work with hardware wallets, and works with lower commissions. SegWit streamlines the transaction process, creates conditions for the subsequent increase in block size, and reduces the transaction size by an average of 48%.

The developers of SegWit are primarily the developers of Bitcoin-Core, who later started working for the Blockstream startup. In May 2017, one of the clauses of the New York agreements implied the holding of Segwit2x - a hard fork, after which the block size was supposed to increase to 2 megabytes. However, on November 8, 2017, the planned fork was canceled. Winnie Lingham, the founder of the Civic project, believes that the abandonment of the hard fork will provoke an increase in the popularity of Bitcoin Cash due to the increased block size.

In conclusion, Segregated Witness, or SegWit, is a solution to improve the Bitcoin network. It separates the witness part of the data from the basic part of the transaction, a feature called Segregated Witness. This separation helps to increase the bandwidth of the network, saves disk space for full nodes, and simplifies the process of checking the status of the transaction. As the Bitcoin network continues to grow, solutions like SegWit will be crucial in maintaining its efficiency and scalability.