Segregated Witness
SegWit
Full title | Segregated Witness (Consensus layer) |
BIP number | BIP 141 |
Type | Miner-activated softfork |
Purpose | Prevent unintended transaction malleability |
Deployment | |
Signalling bit | Bit 1 "segwit" |
Starttime | 2016-11-15 00:00:00 |
Timeout | 2017-11-15 00:00:00 |
Supermajority | 95% of last 2016 block period |
Lock-in | Block #479708 2017-08-08 19:05:58 |
Activated | Block #481824 2017-08-24 01:57:37 |
After the successful activations of OP_CLTV and OP_CSV, SegWit was the last protocol change needed to make the Lightning Network safe to deploy on the Bitcoin network.
Because the witness structure contains Script versioning, it is also possible to make changes to or introduce new opcodes to SegWit scripts that would have originally required a hardfork to function without SegWit.
See Also
- BIP 141 Segregated Witness (Consensus layer)
- BIP 143 Transaction Signature Verification for Version 0 Witness Program
- BIP 144 Segregated Witness (Peer Services)
- BIP 145 getblocktemplate Updates for Segregated Witness
- BIP 147 Dealing with dummy stack element malleability
- BIP 173 Base32 address format for native v0-16 witness outputs
- Segregated Witness Benefits
- Segregated Witness Wallet Developer Guide