The following opinion piece on Segregated Witness was written by Jonald Fyookball
In 2017, Dr. Peter Rizun noted that Segregated Witness (Segwit) changes the very definition of a Bitcoin as per the whitepaper: “We define an electronic coin as a chain of digital signatures.” In this article, I would like to expand on that topic and add a key observation: breaking the chain of digital signatures is actually removing an integrity check in the Bitcoin ledger. Bitcoin is a distributed ledger system — a form of database. When it comes to databases in general, there are many different kinds of data integrity. One type, user-defined integrity, refers to a set of rules for a specific application (in this case, Bitcoin).
Also read: Mainstream Media Believes Satoshi Nakamoto is Back
In Bitcoin, one of the most important types of data are the digital signatures that prove a coin was transferred properly. The fact that signatures cannot be forged is one reason that your coins in storage are safe, even if the network were to undergo a 51% attack.
By defining a coin as a chain of digital signatures (and by implementing Bitcoin to require the signature to be part of the transaction which then gets hashed into the input of the next transaction), Bitcoin establishes an important data integrity check.
To a user, the threat is always that of coins vanishing or being stolen. Bitcoin’s security model ensures that for a coin to move, a corresponding signature has to be produced, and it has to be included in a transaction and published on the blockchain.
Since producing a fake signature is assumed to be hard, no one can steal your coins unless they got a hold of your private keys. When
