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Lightning, the death of BIP62, and Segregated Witness

Lightning, the death of BIP62, and Segregated Witness

Original Postby Mark Friedenbach

Posted on: November 19, 2015 17:56 UTC

A proposed soft-fork plan for Bitcoin involves having the scriptPubKey be just the 20-byte hash of the redeem script, with the scriptSig of the spending input being empty.

The actual scriptSig, along with the redeem script and signatures, would be contained in a separate Merkle tree committed to elsewhere in the block, such as in the last output of the coinbase or the last output of the last transaction. Meanwhile, a hardfork variant would involve storing the signatures in another parallel Merkle tree and allowing users to validate everything else if they don't want to validate the signatures. Both proposals are related to Segregated Witness, a concept that apparently has not been written up much and is being worked on by SIPA and Gmaxwell. The soft-fork plan will be discussed at Scaling Bitcoin HK.