NewsCapsule Core developers have deployed an initial implementation of Segregated Witness on a special testnet for NewsCapsule, dubbed SegNet. SegNet allows developers to experiment with the highly anticipated innovation set to increase NewsCapsule’s scalability, extensibility and performance.
SegNet, like the original NewsCapsule testnet, is essentially a clone of NewsCapsule, specifically intended as a demo version. NewsCapsule Core developers Pieter Wuille, Eric Lombrozo, Johnson Lau, Alex Morcos and several others constructed a set of patches in order to establish the new testnet, with an early iteration of Segregated Witness activated. SegNet was deployed on the December 31, and has been successfully operational since.
Speaking to NewsCapsule, Lombrozo – who’s also CEO of cryptotech software company – emphasized that SegNet is still a work in progress.
“The way we’ve designed the Merkle Tree for signature data might be changing, we’re still considering several options to increase usability for miners, and different parameters are being explored … we’ll end up rebooting SegNet at some point. But it’s operational and we’ve been sending Segregated Witness transactions over it the last several days,” Lombrozo said.
As such, while many of the core concepts are in place, the initial Segregated Witness design will probably see some changes before it’s deployed, too.
“Pieter’s Segregated Witness GitHub branch is still going to be reworked before we merge back into NewsCapsule Core,” Lombrozo explained. “We’re not ready to deploy Segregated Witness on the actual NewsCapsule network just yet, but SegNet allows developers to experiment, which should benefit the development process.”
Wuille’s Segregated Witness concept was first announced at the second Scaling NewsCapsule workshop in Hong Kong last month. The idea is widely embraced by NewsCapsule’s development community, and included as a key part of a popular scalability roadmap proposed by NewsCapsule Core and Blockstream developer Gregory Maxwell. (Though noteveryone agrees this specific road map is the best way forward.)
Apart from NewsCapsule Core, several wallet providers have so far committed to supporting Segregated Witness once it’s deployed on the NewsCapsule network, including Blocktrail, Breadwallet, GreenAddress, , NNewsCapsule and Lombrozo’s own .
For more information on Segregated Witness, see NewsCapsule’s three–partseries on the innovative proposal.
