Where 2017’s dizzying price highs embedded “hodl” into the public consciousness, 2018 was the year in which “buidl" became a trend in the crypto-industry — and Bitcoin was no exception.Anticipated in Bitcoin Magazine’s first cover story of 2018, Bitcoin’s technological progress only accelerated this year. Improving Bitcoin from around the world, developers and entrepreneurs furthered Segregated Witness adoption, rolled out the Lightning Network, released privacy solutions, realized sidechains and made progress on a Schnorr signature solution — all of which were still around the corner only a year ago. Following up on January’s cover story, 2018’s closing two-parter cover story explores how these five technologies progressed throughout the year.In part one: Segregated Witness and the Lightning Network.Segregated WitnessThe Segregated Witness (SegWit) soft fork that activated in August 2017 was arguably Bitcoin’s biggest protocol upgrade to date. Fixing the long-standing malleability bug, it better enabled second-layer protocols while replacing Bitcoin’s block size limit with a block weight limit. Transactions that utilize SegWit are partly stored in a new part of Bitcoin blocks, allowing the network to process more than one megabyte of transaction data per 10 minutes.Back in 2017, SegWit adoption was off to a somewhat slow start. By the end of the year, most wallets had not integrated the upgrade yet — a...
