After a spectacular run up to $3,000, bitcoin prices have been choppy, falling as low as $1,830 in mid-July. But the announcement of a software upgrade called Segregated Witness (SegWit) caused prices to rally more than $1,000 in just a few days.
SegWit removes signature data from transactions, allowing bitcoin to perform more transactions and develop different functionalities. The Epoch Times spoke to the host of the Bitcoin Knowledge Podcast Trace Mayer about SegWit, the problems posed by bitcoin miners, and expectations about price movements going forward.
The Epoch Times: It looks like bitcoin is getting a major upgrade with SegWit. Can you explain?
Trace Mayer: SegWit lays the platform for bitcoin to scale and it also lays a big platform for extensibility. We’re going to be able to do all types of things because it is also a fix for something called transaction malleability. By fixing a lot of these things with SegWit, bitcoin is just going to be so much more. It’s a really, really big upgrade.
