Is SegWit dangerous? A part of the bitcoin community has been brawling in the recent days about possible drawbacks of the most-awaited upgrade to the Bitcoin Core.
Earlier this week, a blog post entitled Segregated Witness's soft fork and a vote of no confidence by the software engineer Steve Sokolowski climbed to the front page of the popular online bitcoin community Reddit BTC (/r/BTC), which entailed numerous inaccuracies in regards to the impact of the Segregated Witness on bitcoin users, businesses, and miners.
In short, the entire article suggested that the Segregated Witness “breaks much of the existing software deployed across the cryptocurrency industry.” It explained that exchanges will have to be rewritten to adapt to the SegWit implementation and block explorers will need to be modified.
The article emphasised that such changes would be very costly for businesses and platform operators, which will essentially expose the negative impact of the Segregated Witness on the bitcoin ecosystem.
The blog post based on misleading and inaccurate information triggered the Bitcoin Core developer Greg Maxwell, who heavily criticised the ignorance of the users who upvoted the topic to the front page of the online community.
“I look at things like this – lies which are so transparent since there are dozens of non-segwit block explorers that continue to work fine... and wonder why the authors think there is any chance that posting them is doing to do anything but damage their reputation,” said Greg Maxwell.
He also noted that a substantial part of the online community is not concerned about the accurate evaluation of the Bitcoin Core team’s proposals concerning the soft fork and its implementation.
“But then I look and see it voted to the top or rbtc and I remember that there are people that don't care about the truth and others who will believe anything,” Maxwell added.
Apart from some inaccuracies, the article makes a questionable suggestion that Bitcoin Core proposals, such as the SegWit, are actually forcing exchanges and miners to apply the updates. Meanwhile, in reality, each business, individual, miner and user will retain the choice not to run the updated software or node. More importantly, even if changes occur, exchanges, block explorers and wallet platforms are not required to modify any of their existing systems.
“Block explorers don't need to be modified, though they won't display the new segwit specific information-- but this information isn't normally the critical information displayed by an explorer: How many funds was moved, to what addresses, and where did it come from, how many confirmations,” explained Maxwell.
He emphasised that exchanges do not need any modification at all.
The bottom line here is, while having two opposing communities, Reddit Bitcoin and Reddit BTC (pro big block size), enables better communication amongst users and developers in the bitcoin industry, both groups must take necessary steps to evaluate each other’s proposals and software before criticising them.
Joseph Young
