How do I know when it's safe to make a SegWit transaction? #8584

I had a thought that some forks of bitcoin may be reluctant to add Segregated Witness due to uncertainty over its safety. For example, if a node makes a SegWit transaction and for some reason the miners choose to allow spending from a SegWit transaction then the funds could be intercepted.

What safeguard or guarantees are in place to reassure users that SegWit transactions will be treated as such by all miners BEFORE they are created? Is it just a case of letting everyone test the water first with small transactions and letting enough time go by to see that miners are making it safe to create them?

Isn't that what the BIP9 soft fork mechanism is supposed to do? It requires 95%. After the fork is active, miners will be enforcing segwit rules.

On 8/24/2016 10:45 PM, R E Broadley wrote:

I had a thought that some forks of bitcoin may be reluctant to add Segregated Witness due to uncertainty over its safety. For example, if a node makes a SegWit transaction and for some reason the miners choose to allow spending from a SegWit transaction then the funds could be intercepted.

What safeguard or guarantees are in place to reassure users that SegWit transactions will be treated as such by all miners BEFORE they are created? Is it just a case of letting everyone test the water first with small transactions and letting enough time go by to see that miners are making it safe to create them?

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Yes, and the wallet code will refuse to create segwit transaction before the softfork activates.

Also, no software will by default start using segwit transactions at this point. I expect that to happen only in new releases after activation.

Please use the bitcoin stack exchange for these kinds of questions, not github.

@laanwj It's not clear to me what you mean by "these kinds of questions". I recently looked at the stack exchange and it does not seem a relevant place to ask questions regarding Bitcoin Core development - although I do agree that a place for such questions ought to be established.

"How do I know when it's safe to make a SegWit transaction?" is a relevant question for bitcoin, its scope is much wider than bitcoin core development, and it is a user question. So that belongs on the stack overflow.

If it were a specific, detailed, question about the code it'd be different. I think your best bet would be asking on IRC. But don't open issues for questions. Issues are meant to track concrete problems.

@laanwj I wasn't aware any development team other than bitcoin core were working on segwit, so my apologies if this was more generic than I'd realised.