Upgrading Behemoth Bitcoin Blockchain – Bitcoin Magazine: Bitcoin News, Articles, Charts, and Guides

The Behemoth

The Behemoth, a primeval, “unconquerable beast” in the biblical book of Job. Though largely considered a myth, this beast was said to be over 300 feet in height and weighed over 80,000 metric tons. As is to be expected of such a ginormous creature, its gaits would have caused the earth beneath its feet to tremble with every step as it trudges majestically — slowly — through the land. Now you would agree that it would be physically impossible for such a beast to make any sudden turns or suddenly alter the direction of its movement, yes?

Well, the Bitcoin network can be likened to a behemoth. Some may say that it is still in its infancy seeing as it’s only 12 years old compared to other preexisting monetary systems. Well, in that case, I’ll say it’s a 12-year-old — not so much an infant — with a gigantic 360-gigabyte data repository, powering a 1.1 trillion dollar ecosystem, that has about 76 million unique addresses, and a little over 1 million of those addresses currently active as at the time of writing. Considering the age of the network, if those figures aren’t considered behemoth , then I don’t know what is.

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Being a decentralized, open-source, peer-to-peer network, Bitcoin — unlike most other networks run by centralized protocols — isn’t run, nor controlled, by any single entity but by its users spread out across the globe. Because the network’s smooth running depends on complete consensus between all network users and participants, no adjustments, changes or upgrades can be made on its ever-growing 360-gigabyte database without the general approval of its participants. As a result of this, these changes or upgrades don’t happen very often. We could say that changes or upgrades can only be implemented slowly — majestically, like the movement of the Behemoth.

The last significant upgrade to the network was implemented in 2017.

The Blocksize War

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Back in 2015, the era of The Blocksize War, was an interesting time in Bitcoin history. It is a good example of what happens when participants within the network don’t reach a consensus about the affairs of the network. During that time, Bitcoin’s adoption rate reached new heights. As the number of users transferring bitcoin within the network increased, it got bogged down with larger volumes of transactions than its capacity could handle, leading to an overall decrease in transaction processing time. Several proposals were submitted by different schools of thought within the Bitcoin community. One of those proposals suggested increasing the individual block sizes as a solution to the problem. That, of course, was met with opposition, leading to the famed “Blocksize War” and eventually a hard fork in the network that led to the creation of Bitcoin cash.

Hard fork …oh, I don’t mean a piece of cutlery made out of vibranium or adamantium. And yes, there’s also a “soft” variation. Some complex terms, no? Okay, for contextual clarity, I’ll quickly run through what they both mean. First of all, a fork, in this instance, is a change in the underlying protocol of a blockchain. A soft fork is a change or an upgrade in the network that is backward compatible with its previous versions, in which all participants see this upgrade as valid. Now in the case of a hard fork, remember when I said that all participants have to agree on changes in a network for it to be implemented? Well, a failure by the participants to reach an agreement, with the proposing party still holding strong to their notion or idea for the network, results in a split, “a fork in the road” if you will, where a whole new network is created and is run by either a completely new protocol, or a version of the old one that suits the ideals of its creators.

Simple enough, yes? Now, let’s get back to the story.

The Doctor To The Rescue

SegWit, or Segregated Witness, a soft fork of the Bitcoin blockchain, was one of the proposed solutions to the problem that was plaguing the network. SegWit works by decoupling signature data from individual Bitcoin transactions and efficiently rearranging them in each block. The good doctor, Pieter Wuille — a Bitcoin core developer who proposed this upgrade — suggested that it would significantly increase transaction speeds on the network. So, look at it like this: Since it had been established that digital signatures account for 65% of the data from a given transaction, separating or segregating the witness (the digital signature of the sender) from the entire data effectively reduces its volume, thereby reducing the amount of time it would take a miner to validate or verify it. This proposal made sense, and after the network participants reached a consensus, it was agreed upon and work began effectively on it. After several tests and trials, the SegWit upgrade on the Bitcoin blockchain went live on August 23, 2017.

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