Bitcoin.de activates SegWit – customers save fees

The protocol extension SegWit has been active for a while now. Bitcoin.de has been supporting the new transaction format for deposits since this week. All customers benefit from the lower fees. 

It was one of the wishes that customers have repeatedly expressed over the past few months: The large German marketplace for Bitcoins and other crypto currencies, Bitcoin.de , is intended to support Segregated Witness (SegWit). SegWit is a new format for transactions in which the signature (the witness) is stored in a separate field. 

In addition to many other advantages, SegWit increases the maximum amount of data transferred per block – and thus the capacity of Bitcoin. The result is that transactions are confirmed faster and cost fewer fees. This enables us to prevent extremely expensive fees from occurring again like at the end of 2017 and beginning of 2018. It is also necessary to pay close attention to the protocol, mina is one of the most popular protocols, it is advisable to understand its affiliation.

Customers can recognize the SegWit addresses currently used by Bitcoin.de by the fact that they are now marked with a ” 3 ”begin. These are the so-called “Pay-to-Script-Hash” addresses (short: P2SH). These are used to execute more complex transaction scripts, such as multisig transactions that have to be signed by several parties, or SegWit transactions in which the signature is outsourced to a special field. The next address you generate in your account will be in this format.Please note that you usually already have an address in the old format that you must have used at least once in order to be able to create a new address. 

Native SegWit addresses after the bech32 scheme are currently not supported for deposits. However, since this week it is possible to withdraw Bitcoins to bech32 addresses. This address format has the advantage that it supports SegWit “natively”, which means that you do not need any extra data to press the SegWit format into a P2SH format. This makes transactions a little smaller and therefore even cheaper. Bech32 addresses differ significantly from the usual addresses: They start with bc1, have 42 or more characters and consist exclusively of lowercase letters. 

By switching to SegWit, Bitcoin.de customers will be in Save significantly on fees in the future. Bitcoins has been sending payouts “batched” for a long time, which means that many payouts are packed into one transaction. This reduces the fees anyway, both for the payers and for the operation of the marketplace in general, but becomes even cheaper if customers have previously deposited Bitcoins on SegWit addresses. The fees for a transaction are, however, distributed independently to the participating customers. This means that the effect of SegWit on the fee structure is not immediately fully visible, but only over time.

Leofric Averille

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