what is SegWit in Blockchain

 What is SegWit?  

 

As the part of Soft fork, Bitcoin has adopted a solution to fix transaction malleability known as Segregated Witness or SegWit. What is transaction malleability? The possibility to indirectly modify transaction IDs and hashes is known as ‘Transaction Malleability’. Some of the essentials of SegWit are

o   Increases block size four times with the block weight concept

o   Reduces transaction fees

o   Remedy to transaction malleability such as the modification of transaction IDs and hashes.

SegWit was conceptualized developer Pieter Wiulle at the Scaling Bitcoin conference in December 2015, where the primary topic was making Bitcoin grow bigger and faster. The design of SegWit was first outlined in Bitcoin Improvement Proposals (BIPs) 141 and 148. The purpose was to address the ability to change signatures and transaction IDs known as ‘transaction malleability’. However, the ability to change the contents of the BTC transactions was not available. Nevertheless, SegWit was developed towards having more complex features in blockchain such as scaling solutions and smart contract functionality.

SegWit in the process of invention, reinvented the concept of block size which was only 1 MB of data. SegWit on the other hand was built with the new concept known as ‘block weight’. With block weight, each block has the limit of 4 M weight units or or 1 M vbytes, meaning that 1 vbyte equals 4 weight units.

Now what is block weight?

Weight units are a measurement used to compare the size of different Bitcoin transactions, opposed to the maximum block size of 1 MB. Weight units are also used to measure the size of other block chain data, such as block headers. As of Bitcoin Core 0.13.0 (released August 2016), each weight unit represents 1/4,000,000th of the maximum size of a block. Virtual size (vsize), also called virtual bytes (vbytes), are an alternative measurement, with one vbyte being equal to four weight units. That means the maximum block size measured in vsize is 1 million vbytes.

This redesign of block size also results in lower transaction fees. While initially the transaction fee was determined by the transaction size, with the introduction of block weight, the fee became

SegWit was first activated on Litecoin on 10 May 2017 and later on Bitcoin on 23 Aug, 2017. As it was implemented through the means of soft fork, the blockchain is compatible with the nodes that do not support SegWit. This means that full nodes in the Bitcoin network will have the same copy of the ledger, regardless of how large their blocks are.