
How Segregated Witness Is About to Fix Hardware Wallets - prostoalex
https://bitcoinmagazine.com/articles/how-segregated-witness-is-about-to-fix-hardware-wallets-1478110057?_ke=bW9za2FseXVrQGdtYWlsLmNvbQ%3D%3D
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rampage101
Any thoughts about how half of the Bitcoin community does not support these
changes? Currently there are 2 subreddits, r/bitcoin and r/btc where the first
one is pushing the changes and censoring people, while the second group says
the SegWit changes will be a disaster.

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wmf
It's probably not half the community, but we'll know soon when voting starts.

There is a certain elegance to just increasing the block size and leaving
everything else about Bitcoin the same — no segwit, no lightning, etc. And it
could have been done a year ago.

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kobeya
Why would a straight block size increase be elegant? It preserves a bunch of
protocol warts like witness malleability, quadratic hashing, lack of script
versioning, etc. I think it is far more elegant to have a single protocol
change that fixes all these issues in one fell swoop and also an effective
block size increase.

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder I suppose.

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kanzure
[https://bitcoincore.org/en/2016/01/26/segwit-
benefits/](https://bitcoincore.org/en/2016/01/26/segwit-benefits/)

[https://bitcoincore.org/en/2016/10/28/segwit-
costs/](https://bitcoincore.org/en/2016/10/28/segwit-costs/)

[https://bitcoincore.org/en/2016/10/27/segwit-upgrade-
guide/](https://bitcoincore.org/en/2016/10/27/segwit-upgrade-guide/)

[https://bitcoincore.org/en/segwit_wallet_dev/](https://bitcoincore.org/en/segwit_wallet_dev/)

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woah
Segregated witness is kind of a clever hack to eke out a little extra room in
bitcoin blocks. Here's an article on it:
[http://hackingdistributed.com/2016/04/05/how-software-
gets-b...](http://hackingdistributed.com/2016/04/05/how-software-gets-
bloated/)

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TD-Linux
I hit this issue two years ago while writing a "hardware wallet" that ran on
Rockbox (so it could be sued with a Sansa Clip or other commodity hardware).
It put me off finishing the project due to the complexity needed to work
around it. With this fix, signing Bitcoin transactions offline is basically
just as easy as any other digital message. I wish this annoyance in the
original design could have been corrected sooner, but there is something to be
said about the large amount of review that went into the change.

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davidgerard
In the meantime, 75% of Bitcoin hashpower is about to be in _one_ building:

[http://www.newsbtc.com/2016/11/04/bitmain-response-new-
minin...](http://www.newsbtc.com/2016/11/04/bitmain-response-new-mining-
center/)

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freework
I don't quite understand what the problem being solved here is. Apparently the
attack this change fixes only applies to if you have a trojan on your machine?
If you have a trojan, then I'm pretty sure no protocol change will save you...

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ascorbic
I think hardware wallets are specifically designed to deal with that sort of
threat.

