Cryptocurrency exchange BitMEX added support for native segregated witness (SegWit) addresses for Bitcoin (BTC) withdrawals, which lets users pay lower transaction fees. According to an announcement on Dec. 12, BitMEX now allows its users to withdraw Bitcoin to Bech32 addresses, the one that natively supports the segregated witness standard. Bitcoin address formats As the announcement explains, the Bitcoin network currently supports three address formats. The first one — Bitcoin’s original address format — is pay to public key hash (P2PKH), which starts with a 1. The second format is the pay to script hash (P2SH), which allows users to send …
Are there downsides to SegWit? SegWit is associated with Bitcoin and its core principles, so its strengths and weaknesses will vary depending on who is observing it. SegWit’s ability to give blocks more weight, or transaction density, relies on the idea that some blockchain data will be kept off the original chain, which is instead used as a sort of reference or index. Some believe that offloading data from the blockchain is already a failure, as it’s like admitting that blockchain alone can’t function. From this perspective, SegWit itself is a weakness infecting Bitcoin, and that’s why rather than implement …
The evolution of key industries have been historically driven by groundbreaking technological innovations that leave an indelible mark on society. The printing press led to the scientific revolution, the discovery of electricity brought light to the world, radio waves changed the way information was delivered to the masses, and the internet completely overhauled the way we communicate and interact with information. In the same vein, over the short space of a decade, Bitcoin has had a similarly disruptive and innovative effect on the financial world and the technology underpinning cryptocurrency has gone on to influence a number of sectors in …
Max Keiser has raised his Bitcoin price forecast to $10,000 as the cryptocurrency industry celebrates SegWit activation. Joining figures such as Andreas Antonopoulos and Bobby Lee, Keiser, who is notoriously bullish on Bitcoin, said his “interim” price estimate had doubled from $5000. Lee’s BTCC pool mined the first SegWit block for Bitcoin. #Segwit activated. I'm raising my interim price target for #Bitcoin to $10,000. — Max Keiser (@maxkeiser) August 24, 2017 #segwit activated! Congratulations to all the devs who worked on this bitcoin upgrade! — Andreas (@aantonop) August 24, 2017 We got it! First #SegWit Block, block number #481,824 mined …
Got some Satoshi to send or Bitcoin (BTC) wallets to reorganize? It’s increasingly cheap to do so. According to an Arcane Research report, Bitcoin “transaction fees have stayed low since July 2021, showing no signs of rising.” There was, however, a small bump in transaction fees last week. Shown as a small jump at the tail end of the graph, clustering of the mempool pushed “up the average transaction fees per day over the past seven days to $691,000, a doubling since last Tuesday.” Nonetheless, the doubling in transaction fees is insignificant: transaction fees remained in a low range. Miners …