The Homework Task by @gbenga:

Segwit Bitcoin Network or Legacy Bitcoin Network, which do you prefer and why?

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_{Source Pixabay}

Segwit VS Legacy

What is Segregated Witness (SegWit)?

SegWit or more commonly known as Segregated Witness is an upgrade to Bitcoin that made its transactions more secure and more efficient. This was done by separating (segregation) the main part of the transaction data from the other part which authorizes the transaction (or the witness), making the entire transaction more secure than before.

Separating those two parts also made the transaction's data smaller, and because of that it allows more transactions to be sent all at once.

As the BTC community continues to adopt SegWit, this will make the Bitcoin blockchain able to process more transactions than before. Bitcoin transactions will be sent more quickly, and there will be an increase in throughput which will reduce the overall network fee required for each transaction.

The most visible difference between SegWit and Legacy Bitcoin addresses are the address formats.

Three address types:

Legacy (P2PKH) addresses start with a 1.
Nested SegWit (P2SH) addresses start with a 3.
Native SegWit (bech32) addresses start with bc1.

All of those three address formats are used to send & receive bitcoin.

The difference is not all wallets support all three address types. The original BTC addresses are the Legacy addresses. You can expect all wallets to support sending and receiving to Legacy addresses.

Not every wallet or service has been upgraded to support the newly created SegWit address formats and that means some wallets can only send to Legacy addresses. That's okay if someone would like to send you bitcoins from a SegWit address, your Legacy address will be able to receive it just fine.

_{Source Pixabay}

Which I Prefer?

To be honest, the winner here is very clear. SegWit is a big improvement from the lecagy bitcoin system and that's the one I'd pick or prefer.

However, I'm still going to be limited to what wallet I use and what they currently support. It's a good thing that most wallets I have is already using the Segwit network, based on the fact that my addresses there starts with the number 3 already.

It's evident that users will prefer SegWit versus legacy because of the improvements I mentioned above.

_{Source NewsBTC}

Final Thoughts

As of the moment, the biggest problem with Bitcoin would still be scalability - that translate to slower transactions and higher fees needed. I think the Lightning network is a good improvement for that. I just think that mass adoption is still needed for that, and if there will be other solutions to lowering down the fees for doing bitcoin transactions, I think that's a must.

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Thanks a lot for reading!

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_{Images with no source were made by me. Thanks @gbenga, @steemitblog, @steemcurator01, @steemcurator02.}