On Feb 25, 2017 14:09, "Steve Davis via bitcoin-dev" <bitcoin-dev@lists.linuxfoundation.org> wrote:

Hi Peter,

I really, really don’t want to get into it but segwit has many aspects that are less appealing, not least of which being the amount of time it would take to reach the critical mass.

Surely there's a number of alternative approaches which could be explored, even if only to make a fair assessment of a best response?

Any alternative to move us away from RIPEMD160 would require:

* A drafting of a softfork proposal, implementation, testing, review.

* A new address format

* Miners accepting the new consensus rules

* Wallets adopting the new address format, both on the sender side and receiver side (which requires new signatures).

I.e., exactly the same as segwit, for which most of these are already done. And it would still only apply to wallets adopting it.

Pieter