Mastering Blockchain - Second Edition

Segregated Witness (SegWit)

The SegWit or Segregated Witness is a soft fork based update to the Bitcoin protocol which addresses some weaknesses such as throughput and security in the Bitcoin protocol. SegWit offers a number of improvements as listed here:

• Fix for transaction malleability due to the separation of signature data from transactional data. In this case, it is no longer possible to modify transaction ID because it is no longer calculated based on the signature data present within the transaction.
• Reduction in transaction size results in cheaper transaction fees.
• Reduction in transaction signing and verification times, which results in faster transactions.
• Script versioning, which allows version number to be prefixed to locking ...