Is Segregated Witness necessary for the Lightning Network? Yes. The Lightning Network can be implemented at this time but the result would be less efficient without SegWit. It is a pre-requisite for a lot of things.
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Ah uh so let me start with the second question first. So is segregated witness necessary for lightning and uh is there also something in segregated witness for side chains? No, that was Yes, there are bits missing from the bitcoin mainet which mean that at the moment lightning network can be done but in a very complicated way that is not very efficient. So SegWit is necessary to do that.
And there is a bit missing that is required for side chains which is you need to have a particular script operator that allows you to uh publish SPV proofs a simple payment verification proof chains basically of Merkel trees that point to specific transactions. In order to implement a two-way peg, that is a requirement. In order to do it smoothly, to do side chain smoothly in Bitcoin, you need to upgrade the language. Now, SegWit provides a very efficient scripting language upgrade mechanism that could make SPV proofs very easy to do uh because it has a script versioning number.
So you could create a new version number two uh and that version number could implement a side chain um SPV proof code very simply with SegWit. Uh so SegWit is a prerequisite for a lot of things. You could do side chains by doing um replacing one of the existing op codes um the same way that checklo time verify was introduced. It took one of the unused op codes and changed its meaning through a soft fork.
But if you can get that kind of change through, why not just get SegWit done? Uh which would make things a lot easier. All right. The second question is [Music]