SegWit Activation Push & Scaling Wars
Code: NT-101
Tags: #bitcoin #scaling #segwit
Language: en
Field Notes
Core developers, mining pool leads, and wallet teams were juggling IRC debates with in-person meetups to explain why SegWit mattered. The Hong Kong and New York agreement chatter made every roadmap slide political, so much of January was spent lining up credible signaling from exchanges and economic nodes.
Market Read
BTC traded in the $800–$1,200 range while fees spiked whenever blocks filled, giving businesses a pain point they could quantify. OTC desks reported clients delaying settlement whenever mempools clogged, which strengthened the argument for SegWit’s malleability fix and throughput boost.
Technical Moves
BIP141 (SegWit) had been coded for months, but activation required either BIP9 miner signaling or the threatened BIP148 user-activated soft fork. Wallets such as GreenAddress and hardware vendors prepped bech32 support even though adoption timelines were uncertain.
Open Questions
Would large mining pools ever cross the 95% signaling threshold without a block-size trade-off? Could a user-activated soft fork fragment the chain if hash power refused to follow the new rules?