Coinbase starts supporting segwit

A step ahead

Finally they did it. Coinbase, leading exchange platform, announced started supporting segwit addresses for bitcoin. This is a great news for all bitcoiners in the world. Infact the most popular exchanger has decided to put in use this innovation and this will give a huge opportunity more to bitcoin.

What the hell is segwit?

For those who are not familiar with SegWit, this upgrade helps reduce the size of Bitcoin transactions. This improves the overall transaction capacity of the Bitcoin network and should also help reduce the fees customers pay on bitcoin transactions. You can read more about SegWit in the following link

[urlpreviewbox url=”https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SegWit”/]

Please also see this article where it’s explained how to move your existing bitcoin on a legacy address (with ledger nano S hardware wallet) to a segwit address on the same hardware wallet.

Bitcoin Core:

“As transactions that use segwit features begin to be used, this change will allow more data to be included per block (with 100% of transactions using segwit features this is expected to be about 2MB of data per block, however in the worst case could be up to 4MB of data per block). In so far as it allows a greater transaction volume, it can be expected to increase the UTXO database more quickly (with 100% of transactions using segwit features, the rate of increase might be expected to approximately double; however because segwit is a soft fork, the worst case UTXO growth is unchanged).”

We can know that an address is segwit simply looking at first digit of address. Infact 3 points out that the address is segwit, while 1 means standard legacy one.