Subject: Re: [bitcoin-dev] Segregated witness softfork with moderate adoption has very small block size effect

From: Douglas Roark <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 19 Dec 2015 17:19:59 -0800

On 2015/12/19 08:49, jl2012 via bitcoin-dev wrote:
> P2SH has been introduced for 3.5 years and only about 10% of
> bitcoin is stored this way (I can't find proportion of existing
> P2SH address). A 1-year adoption rate of 40% for segwit is clearly
> over-optimistic unless the tx fee becomes really high.

I don't think one can necessarily conflate P2SH and SegWit uptake. In
the case of P2SH, there's the "if it ain't broke, don't fix it"
problem. P2PKH works just fine for an awful lot of Bitcoin users. Why
should they switch over to P2SH? In the absence of a compelling
reason, they'll probably stick to a proven solution. (You can see that
line of thinking anywhere.) Even Armory, which values security and
whiz-bang features over usability, offers P2SH but keeps it off by
default.

Meanwhile, SegWit fixes multiple problems, or at least fixes some
while also sticking a bit of gum on others. True, it'll rely on wallet
uptake. I just think wallet developers will see the value in it. The
big question, of course, is when they'll enable it by default, which
is the only way SegWit will gain serious traction. My personal,
semi-educated guess is that you'll see 3-6 months of wallet
integration and testnet tweaking, then another 3-6 months of mainnet
availability if explicitly enabled by the user, and finally the switch
being thrown for all wallet users. I'm hoping for the aggressive
timeframes. I'm expecting the conservative ones.

Is 40% optimistic? Maybe, and I'd personally like to see it enabled in
concert with a minimal block size increase. I don't think 40% within a
year of deployment is out of the realm of possibility, though.

- -- 
- ---
Douglas Roark
Cryptocurrency, network security, travel, and art.
https://onename.com/droark
[email-masked]
PGP key ID: 26623924