The SegWit (Segregated Witness) Hard Fork is fast approaching, a change that will help in increasing the transaction speeds of bitcoin, through the segregation (separation) of the digital signature attached to all Bitcoin Transactions from the input and output (essentially the sender's address and the receiver's address). The signature is used to verify whether or not the sender has the necessary funds to make the transfer to the receiver that they are trying to make. The signature takes up about 65% of the block; that being said, segregating the signature from the other inputs/outputs can increase the current size of Blocks (which must be verified by the distributed peer-to-peer nodes that make up the Bitcoin Network) of 1MB to about 4MBs, posits Dr. Pieter Wuille; this doesn’t mean that the data has reduced in size, but rather that they count it in a way allowing for the 1MB limit to be increased.
What This Means For Bitcoin
- The Fear Behind A Hard Fork is alleviated, for now, which could increase price.
- The Show That We Can Come Together To Improve The System Will Likely Increase Coin Price
- The Improvements That Will Come With The Change Mean A Better, More Practical System For Scaling, Which Will DEFINITELY Increase Price
BOTTOM LINE
PRICE WILL INCREASE IF BIP 91 IS AGREED UPON
CURRENTLY, "At the moment, hash power signaling BIP 91 is at 63.2 percent. " (https://www.cryptocoinsnews.com/bitcoin-chain-split-hard-fork-not-likely-miners-agree-segwit/) (not to be confused with BIP 95, which is SegWit2x, which a majority agree needs work before deployment)!
You can use the tool below to track Segwit's progress as it gets closer and closer to being adopted and released to production!