7 Common Myths About SegWit

• Myth # 1 - Blockstream has a patent for SegWit.

No, it's not. Blockstream is not going to patent SegWit. And if anyone is considering such an opportunity, it's too late, because SegWit code was publicly disclosed more than a year ago. Although Blockstream has an ecosystem protection strategy from patent trolls, and they encourage others to adopt the same approach, this strategy does not imply a patent for this technology.

Blockstream positions SegWit as a contribution to the development of the ecosystem in the form of open source technology. SegWit is an upgrade to the Bitcoin prtocol, which includes many features to improve security and performance. In December 2015, the decision to create SegWit was approved by the community, and several separate companies, including Blockstream, and even some of the users participated in its creation.

• Myth # 2 - Blockstream pursues its business goals by supporting SegWit.

This is an erroneous opinion, but Blockstream has other commercial projects, thanks to which they intend to earn, for example, Liquid-sidechain, which allows an instant, confidential and secure transfer of large sums in Bitcoins between trading platforms. At the moment Liquid is at the beta testing stage, in which leading crypto-exchange exchanges take part.

The employees of Blockstream, who are also the developers of Bitcoin Core, are working on the SegWit open source project not for financial reasons, but because they consider this technology to have a significant positive impact on the whole Bitcoin ecosystem, of which they are also a part.

• Myth # 3 - SegWit is required to run Liquid.

Not true. SegWit is not yet activated, but the beta version of Liquid already works and is being tested by many trading platforms. Liquid does not use SegWit and does not depend on SegWit, as it is a separate stand-alone project - a product based on the code underlying Bitcoin, with the addition of some features, such as Confidential Transactions (Confidential Transactions).

Liquid and Bitcoin are two different protocols, two different things.

If SegWit is activated, Liquid will also have to undergo changes to implement a two-way binding to this upgrade.

• Myth # 4 - The Lightning Network does not need SegWit.

This is partly true. Lightning Network is an open source system that can instantly process large amounts of Bitcoin-micropayments. Technically, Lightning can do without SegWit, but it will be less plastic, less efficient, not so lightning-fast, and it will take much longer to develop it. SegWit at times simplifies the development of the second layer of the Bitcoin structure, removing some potential plasticity problems of Bitcoin transactions.

Lightning is not a commercial product; This is an open source protocol in which everyone can contribute to the improvement. Lightning also makes it possible to use its scaling mechanism within private block-network networks.

• Myth # 5 - SegWit allows you to conduct off-chechen transactions.

False statement. SegWit-transactions will not be conducted outside the main chain Bitcoin. SegWit increases the network bandwidth, reducing the amount of transactions themselves and partially increasing the block size, improves and brings a number of useful features to Bitcoin, and also fixes a lot of bugs.

• Myth # 6 - SegWit removes signature data from the transaction.

A common mistake. SegWit does not remove the signature from the transaction. All transactions in the blocks will contain signatures. Operations without signatures will still be void, and signatures in the blocks will continue to be committed.

SegWit allows validators who do not check the validity of signatures, do so without downloading the signatures themselves. This, as before, will not allow invalid transactions to become valid. SegWit does not make invalid blocks valid. It does not make invalid signatures valid. He does not make a transaction without a signature valid. SegWit does not remove captions from blocks - all the contents of the block will be fixed in the header of the block, as it was always fixed.

• Myth # 7: Blockstream is beneficial for SegWit activation.

Blockstream benefits from the activation of SegWit in the same way as any other company that develops technologies based on bitcoin. SegWit fixes flaws and brings a number of corresponding improvements. Everyone benefits from this, everyone in the Bitcoin ecosystem will benefit when SegWit becomes available, because this update, elementary, will make Bitcoin even better.