Why I changed my mind on SegWit and why it sucks so much nopara73 Follow Apr 11, 2017 · 2 min read

As many of you already know I am working on a full-spv TumbleBit wallet, Breeze.

Full Block Downloading SPV wallet

This simply means, the wallet has to download all blocks, note the transactions it needs and throws away the rest. This is necessary to provide full node level privacy.

However Segregated Witness is a block size increase, which makes this wallet type much slower, therefore SW is bad.

But there is more.

I figured out how to make this wallet much lighter. If I segregate the witness then this wallet can download 4 times less data, therefore it can sync much faster. Since SegWit already segregates the witness I wouldn’t gain anything from it. This also shows how terrible this SegWit idea is.

But there is more.

TumbleBit

TumbleBit is a trustless, anonym, scaleable and instant payment hub. However TB has some limitations. With SegWit we might be able to overcome those limitations. This doesn’t sound that bad right? But here is the problem: with SegWit we might be able to overcome those limitations.

This obviously means we would have to do a lot of research and coding for that, which is a pain in the ass.

But there is more.

With SegWit a decent implementation of Lightning network would be possible wich would be a competition to TumbleBit. With today’s Bitcoin we don’t have to compete with LN, so we can conveniently sit on our ass and eat what we cooked.

But there is more.

TumbleBit also competes with JoinMarket with a very similar manner to the competition with LN, but instead of in the category of scaleability it competes in privacy. With SegWit JoinMarket would not only be able to make their system more stable and faster, because of the malleability fix, but also JM would greatly benefit from Schnorr signatures, which would be possible if SW would be implemented. We obviously don’t want our competition to gain this advantage.

Conclusion

In this article I unanomiously proved that Segregated Witness is a terrible idea and we encourage everyone not to promote it in any form.

Let’s forget about this whole signiture separating nonsense and keep playing with the network we have today as Satoshi Nakamoto envisioned it.