Although SegWit was released on August 1, 2017, it is only in recent weeks that there has been a real rise and adoption of the at the level. To this end, Bitcoin Core v0.16.0 has been released announcing the full support of SegWit.

As SegWit is embraced by more exchanges, and more transactions begin to occur with SegWit addresses, those who have contributed to the development of Bitcoin. the past is already excited about upcoming upgrades.

Of course, many will think that the Lightning Network is what will really make the headlines in the coming months because it is gaining popularity. Some Bitcoin developers and contributing developers are also excited about things like BIP159, Signature Aggregation and even Graftroot.

Bitcoin Core, and its developers are an import facet of this whole cryptocurrency ecosystem. In fact, they were the genesis of the giant that was begotten. The developers of Bitcoin Core have an important function in shaping Blockchain, but they have little influence on its direction: it all comes down to the community and the democratized vote.

There are some major developers, such as Wladimir J van der Laan and Jonas Schnelli, as well as a host of contributors working on different aspects at different times. <img alt=" How does SegWit work? "src =" https://cointelegraph.com/storage/uploads/view/ 4e557f0856a2bfe98125a296bff1d7bf.png "style =" height: 250px; width: 250px; "title =" How does SegWit work? "/>

How SegWit Works

The percentage of Segwit transactions on blocks has increased over the last few days and increases Of course, this has a lot to do with Coinbase and Bitfinex which announce the implementation of SegWit in their exchanges, but it is also the result of the v0.16.0 upgrade of Bitcoin Core.

Peter Todd, who announced on Twitter, the update v0.16.0 version was entrusted to Cointelegraph on the importance of this change for Bitcoin Core client

"Segwit wallet support is of course useful – a lot of services use the Bitcoin wallet Core "Todd explained:" These services now have a simple upgrade path to Segwit, which saves money: for example my own OpenTimestamps calendars can now use Segwit directly – before, they used There is a bit of hack to move the lack of support in the wallet. "

Nicolas Dorier, one of the other contributors to Bitcoin Core (though he did not work on this latest version), has a slightly different opinion of Todd – Believing that most platforms will not need, or use, the Bitcoin Core client for its SegWit needs.

"I'm not sure that exchanges use Bitcoin Core to handle their UTXOs, they probably have their own solution developed, "said Dorian at Cointelegraph." Bitcoin Core is not suitable for a large volume of addresses and transactions. "

" Coinbase uses now SegWit, but I doubt that they use the Bitcoin Core Portfolio feature for their processing. The most exciting thing is not really the SegWit wallet in my opinion, but the BIP159 signaling. "

<img alt=" What is BIP159?" Src = "https://cointelegraph.com/storage/uploads/view/28df5f08d86ff6a285b63fd31f2583a3.png" style = "height: 250px; width: 250px;" title = "What is BIP159?" />

What is BIP159?

With the support of SegWit in v0.16.0 update, the support for signaling pruned nodes was

"Pruned nodes can now report the NODE_NETWORK_LIMITED of BIP159 using bits of service, in preparation for full support of BIP159 in later versions ", indicates the official version of Bitcoin Core. However, the current change does not yet include support for connecting to these pruned peers. "

It's pretty complicated, but it comes down to the storage space on the node because a complete node requires more than 120 GB of blockchain data, which is not always viable, from where pruning nodes often run on older computers or even Raspberry Pis.

Dorien explains how someone like BTCPay can benefit from this latest update for pruned nodes.

"Signaling of BIP159, which declines its space resource for the execution of a complete node, is exciting. For example for BTCPay, merchants without BIP159 must store the complete blockchain to make it work, around 250 GB. BIP159 will do it around 5 GB. Even if everyone will not benefit, BTCPay hosts will do it.

Todd also believes that the storage aspect of BIP159 is promising, but he is looking a little deeper to understand how this can help blockchain whole

"So, BIP159 is important because it sets the stage for the pruned nodes to contribute to the bandwidth, "said Todd. "It's not all that's important – we do not run out of bandwidth – but it improves privacy by making it more difficult for the bad guys to watch the network because there are more nodes relaying blocks and transactions. "

" Do not get me wrong, BIP159 is absolutely an improvement in performance.It's just that we have a lot of space bandwidth on the P2P network, so I'm not sure. the actual impact on performance will be minimal at this time.In the future, this may change if people who run non-pruned nodes move to pruned nodes, but for now this is not a major problem. "

Of course, there is a good way to go to make improvements. on the Bitcoin Blockchain to materialize, but Dorien looks even further, getting excited about Signature Aggregation.

<img alt=" Schnorr signatures and signatures aggregation "src =" https://cointelegraph.com/storage/uploads/view/a0be3cc82835d2037a205e3db1924c02.png "style =" height: 250px; width: 250px; "title =" Aggregation of Signatures and Signatures Schnorr "/>

Aggregation of Signatures and Signatures Schnorr

In January 2018, four Bitcoin developers published an article describing how Schnorr multi-signatures (& # 39; multisig) can help scale the Bitcoin Blockchain.

Greg Maxwell, Andrew Poelstra, Yannick Seurin and Pieter Wuille discuss and illustrate how technology, which & # 39; aggregates multisig data together to reduce its size in a transaction, "Could improve both the performance and privacy of users in Bitcoin"

Dorian says this idea is another exciting improvement for the Bitcoin Blockchain.

"The next great thing will be the aggregation of signatures through Schnorr Signatures"

"Signature Aggregation makes the transaction p read small for the same features and allows interesting tips that have no impact on the size of the blockchain. The most obvious thing is to have an arbitrary number of co-signers for the same transaction, but there is no doubt that crypto assistants will find more interesting things. "

" This has no impact on the resources to execute a complete node while greatly increasing what is possible. "

Todd is also excited about the possibility of aggregation of signatures, but he is a little more tired of looking so far than the Bitcoin environment it's about making changes.

"All the exciting improvements, but who knows how long they will take to implement them? Totally possible, the likes of Bitmain will try to block these obvious performance improvements for political reasons, for example, to try to get a trading leverage for something else. Then we'll see … "

While many might get excited about these power games blocking improvements, Todd is one of the few that embraces this political staging.

"I'm sure other developers would think otherwise, but for me personally, one of the reasons I went into developing Bitcoin was that I thought the political side would be interesting! "

<img alt=" Add on Graftroot" src = "https: / /contelegraph.com/storage/uploads/view/4ec00366a5b731ec19f68cfb5c5cc6f8.png" style = "height: 250px; width: 250px;" title = " Add on Graftroot "/>

Add on Graftroot

Finally, almost like a kind of pipedream, developers are also excited to introduce a Gregory Maxwell, Well respected developer of Bitcoin, published in January an article on "Taproot" with ideas on improvements to the privacy of Merkel's abstract syntax trees (MAST). ), an idea in progress that is geared towards Bitcoin's intelligent contract capabilities

He followed this with another proposal called Graftroot, which is well explained by Jimmy Song in a YouTube video

Dorian explains that if aggregated signatures pass, then it will be easy to see Graftroot at stake:

"For Graftroot it's something very easy to implement once we we have the signature aggregation and that allows big artificially intelligent contracts.The fact that only the executed condition is revealed is very interesting. "

<img alt=" Still at the border" src = " https://cointelegraph.com/storage/uploads/view/519a72afe95bb1917c68ee3fb960a605. png "style =" height: 250px; width: 250px; "title =" Always on the Border "/>

Still on the Border

Bitcoin, as an original Blockchain cryptocurrency, is often shrouded in this perception that it is stale and not evolving while other coins gushed around him promising to have made the necessary improvements.

However, there is a constant buzz around the room. Improvement goes on behind the scenes with developers who often do not make the news Improvements are proposed and pushed to happen, but given the development environment of Bitcoin, these improvements take time.