On a statement released on 18th Nov, BTCC announced full support of SegWit, which resulted in a spike on SegWit adoption:

The last 2k block segwit activation graph. Source: bitcoincore.org

The bitcoin core adoption page shows the 22 entities are SegWit ready and 42 more on the line.

The statement describes the initiation and fruition of SegWit, speaking highly of the contributions of Core developers like Pieter Wuille, Lombrozo, Johnson Lau and a few others. As BTCC is currently in control of 10.73% of the total hashrate, their moves usually attract lots of attention. 8btc community responded variously to the news. Some said it’s impossible to reach the 95% consensus. Some praised that the BTCC made a right decision by flagging support on the mainstream value.

BTCC CTO Mikael Wang, accepted our exclusive interview.

Mikael Wang, BTCC CTO

What is your view on SegWit?

I believe SegWit is a very important milestone in the bitcoin core evolution. It will pave the way for many future scaling solutions and also enable further innovation on the bitcoin network. I’m quite excited to see projects such as lightning network and Rootstock smart contracts to be realized once SegWit is fully activated.

What are the considerations behind BTCC’s support for SegWit?

As a professional business built on top of bitcoin network, it’s paramount for us that the stability in the infrastructure is maintained. SegWit deployed as a soft fork is preferred since it allow us to experiment and roll back in case of critical events. Many fixes included in the segwit release such as transaction malleability are also highly anticipated since it had previously caused a lot of confusions for our users.

Is there a debate over the pros and cons of segwit? Can you name some?

Primary benefits are advanced scaling solutions such lightning network, sidechain and other off-chain solutions. Block size increase up to 4MB, although in reality only about 1.7 MB based on historical transaction patterns. Smart contract capabilities are a very interesting since it can potentially drive bitcoin adoption to mainstream. Critics of segwit have expressed concerns about the complexity of the soft fork, and wish to see a hard fork instead. However, as we have seen and learned from the Ethereum project, any hard fork can be very problematic for businesses and especially new users. A lot of time and efforts are required to understand and tackle the outcome of multiple chains.

It’s said that over 8,000 lines of code were added, did BTCC test segwit over testnet? If so, how did the new code perform?

We have tested the SegWit code for months on testnet and haven’t encountered any major issues for far. All our platform wallets are currently running the latest bitcoin core 0.13.1 version in production.

Here you can find the SegWit code review by Peter Todd.

As per Maya, a Chinese blockchain developer, currently 20.2% of hashrate has revealed support for SegWit, including Slush, Bitclub, BTCC and some unknown miners. The Bitcoin Unlimited support is 11.08%.

SegWit support signalling. Source:btc.com

On the other hand, things might not move on the course as BTCC had expected. With the public boycott of SegWit from Viabtc, which holds 6.5% of the total hashrate, the 95% consensus needed for the Segwit activation seems to be a far-fetching goal at the moment unless individual miners withdrew their hashing from the pool. Moreover, the F2pool doesn’t disclose their standing on the SegWit yet. But Jihan Wu has voiced support for Bitcoin Unlimited, according to Haipo Yang, Founder and CEO of Viabtc. When was asked the recent drop of hashing rate of Viabtc, Yang explained:

As the dry season is coming , some major miners in Sichuan sold their machines due to hydro power shortage. That’s why we see some hashing withdrawal from the network.

But he said the idea of market-based scaling behind Bitcoin Unlimited had been acknowledged by more and more supporters.

It’s still too early to tell the outcome.

Exclusive interview with Haipo Yang will be released soon.