Big thanks to Pieter Wuille in particular for the major coding effort on Segwit. With a little luck, maybe the 13.1 client will get out of release candidate stage earlier than November 15th Here's to a Christmas holidays activation!



There's somewhere around 5 or 6 different Lightning implementations, the teams behind them are apparently collaborating to make each different system interoperable with the others. I suspect they won't take long to test before they roll out beta versions, it's unlikely we'll end up using 6+ different implementations once the tech is mature, and everyone knows the first viable product to market gets a psychological boost.

Anyone read through this - https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/releases/tag/v0.13.1rc1 yet?


SegWit is a soft fork so it won't need full consensus, I was under the impression that only hard forks requires this, am I wrong?

Pieter probably will have a chart at bitcoin.sipa.be tracking the blocks signalling support, he did that for the previous soft forks.

At last some scaling soon ready , it will boost bitcoin, hope no critical code failure anywhere in form of a bug.

This is not entirely true.

Bitcoin Core 0.13.1 should be released sometime in the next week or so, before November 15th. The BIP 9 Start time of November 15th means that miners can start signalling support for Segwit AND nodes will begin actually counting the blocks with support to check for the 95% threshold. The soft fork cannot be activated on November 15th because it requires two full retarget periods. There must be a retarget period of 2016 blocks where 1915 blocks signal support and then another 2016 blocks of a grace period to allow people to upgrade their nodes prior to activation. This means that Segwit can activate at an earliest of ~4 weeks after November 15th in mid December.

Segwit is short for Segregated Witness. It is a consensus change that is backwards compatible that will remove the issue of transaction malleability and provide capacity increases to Bitcoin.

I'm trying to find more info on a point Matt Corallo brought up.
Hopefully someone who knows a lot more about Bitcoin programming can explain this further-

segwit are already in service on Bitcoin network : https://bt.irlbtc.com/view/1594650.msg16624848#msg16624848

I would have actually wanted to see it sooner, so that the bugs.. if there were any, could be sorted out before the Xmas season started.

We do not want to be in a testing phase, when the holidays hits us and we start buying presents for Xmas. Oh, better late than never, or

so they say. 

remember folks. its not just getting miners to allow tx's into blocks. its also merchants changing their wallets to have new keys to be able to "spend" funds if they too want to use segwit..

if its active by christmas then miners have not done any testing on the side.
if merchants have the nodes before christmas, then they too have not done any testing.
if 95% of "segwit" is purely core0.132 and not peoples own implementations of the code. there is no point having distribution apart from worries of power cuts and data loss.

seems the people that want it running before christmas are sounding like they care less about testing, care less about security and more about bitcoin price.

and ontop of that the majority that have this careless nature are mostly people that do not even run a full node in the first place
kind of funny that the "slow careful and smart testing mindset defending cores delays" turns into "before christmas, before christmas before christmas"

anyone wanting it active and in full use before christmas should be tagged as fiat loving bitcoin security hating nutters.
if those same people have previously shouted how any other proposal needs months of review and months of grace period. should be tagged as hypocritical fiat loving bitcoin security hating nutters