Bitcoin investor Trace Mayer: Segregated verification is the best option to end the scaling dispute

Segregated Witness (SegWit) is an update to the Bitcoin protocol. If 95% of the hashrate supports it, the Segregated Witness code will become part of the Bitcoin protocol. Currently, only about 25% of miners have explicitly expressed support for this proposal. There are many choices for users, such as Bitcoin Unlimited or Bitcoin Classic. It can be said that this is a "civil war" in the Bitcoin field.

Supporters of the block size solution say that once the SegWit code is deployed, bitcoin’s privacy could be greatly improved, which helped drive the coin’s price higher in 2017.

Bitcoin investor and entrepreneur Trace Mayer believes that Segregated Witness code can help bitcoin achieve the project's ultimate goal: financial privacy.

Segregated verification can solve many major technical problems, including transaction malleability. Once the transaction malleability problem is solved, Bitcoin's privacy function can be greatly improved through off-chain encrypted transactions.

Mr. Mayer believes that the improvement of Bitcoin privacy will help the price of the currency rise in 2017. This statement is not groundless. The cryptocurrency Monero has been developing rapidly this year due to its privacy features, namely the PoS anonymous consensus method, and its market value has also soared.

Adding functionality is good for it, because adding more options means more value. In other words, Bitcoin becomes more valuable with the additional functionality it adds. More functionality triggers more demand, which leads to more use cases.

Since the code of Segregated Verification is open source, some competing coins, including Litecoin (LTC), have already completed soft forks. Bitcoin has long been called "digital gold", while Litecoin is regarded as the "digital silver" in the early days of cryptocurrency technology. However, Litecoin has long fallen out of favor due to the lack of community interest.

However, after the deployment of the Segwit soft fork, Litecoin may regain attention. Due to its weak user base, the activation of Segwit in the Litecoin system seems to be uncontroversial.

Supporters of SegWit believe that this solution can solve a large number of technical problems in the Bitcoin ecosystem, including transaction scalability, off-chain transactions, data encryption and privacy.

It is also an improvement to the Bitcoin protocol. Compared with the radical and risky hard fork, the isolated verification soft fork is the best solution to achieve the same effect.

Currently, the Bitcoin companies that have clearly expressed their support for isolated verification include Airbitz, BitGo, Blockchain.info, BTCC, Mycelium, etc.

Mr. Mayer has invested in Bitcoin companies such as BitPay, Armory, and Kraken in the early days. He believes that isolated verification is a milestone innovation for the future development of Bitcoin.

The most pressing needs of the Bitcoin system at present are scalability, interchangeability and anonymity. Segregated verification has been well tested and is a major technological innovation that can solve these three core problems. Therefore, those who support the activation of segregated verification are the ones who truly hope to witness the success of Bitcoin and the rise in the price of the currency.

Charlie Lee, the founder (developer) of Litecoin and technical director of Coinbase, has already deployed this technology in the Litecoin system. Mr. Mayer believes that this is the best example to prove the correctness of isolated verification. Even experts agree that isolated verification is the best choice to solve the Bitcoin expansion dispute.

Litecoin and other networks that use blockchain meta-exchange have already deployed SegWit. This allows cryptocurrency markets and economies to gain greater privacy and fungibility, better 'hiding' themselves from market observers.

Atomic swaps, also known as meta cross-chain transactions, are a relatively primitive concept in the cryptocurrency space. They refer to a currency usage model adopted by participants who purchase cryptocurrency portfolios with a speculative mindset, sometimes directly engaging in cross-chain price arbitrage transactions.

Meta-exchange also refers to cryptocurrency users exchanging different currencies for each other — for example, exchanging Bitcoin for Litecoin.

Mr. Mayer concluded:

The segregated verification code is easy to understand and concise. This will be an impeccable soft fork update.