How Segregated Witness Is About to Fix Hardware Wallets | Hacker News Reader

How Segregated Witness Is About to Fix Hardware Wallets

bitcoinmagazine.com

34 pointsprostoalex13 comments

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.

Well, those running nodes seem to support it, and we'll see later in the month how many miners choose to signal support.

There is a significant minority of the bitcoin community who want a straight blocksize increase instead, but the extra space already provided by Segregated Witness is hard to argue against, and it's also technically orthogonal.

> but the extra space already provided by Segregated Witness is hard to argue against

There will be very little "extra space" provided by segwit. The overall capacity may be raised from 3 TPS to 4 TPS.

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.

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.

Those wanting a unlimited block size increase are mostly less technical and don't understand the difference between expanding and scaling.

If it slows nodes down exponentially as the chain gets too big then that isn't scalable.

https://bitcoincore.org/en/2016/01/26/segwit-benefits/

https://bitcoincore.org/en/2016/10/28/segwit-costs/

https://bitcoincore.org/en/2016/10/27/segwit-upgrade-guide/

https://bitcoincore.org/en/segwit_wallet_dev/

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...

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.

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...

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...

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

It will save you, because while your compromised machine could change the transaction before it's signed, the hardware wallet will display the transaction and the change will be visible. Even if the user fails to properly check the destination displayed on their wallet, it still limits potential losses as the user will likely notice if the transaction is for a huge amount (their entire wallet).

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