{"id":23871,"date":"2017-05-11T03:24:51","date_gmt":"2017-05-11T03:24:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/ci027cfe65a00d26c3"},"modified":"2017-05-11T03:24:51","modified_gmt":"2017-05-11T03:24:51","slug":"litecoin-has-now-deployed-segregated-witness","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bitcoinmagazine.com\/technical\/litecoin-has-now-deployed-segregated-witness","title":{"rendered":"Litecoin Has Now Deployed Segregated Witness"},"content":{"rendered":"
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It\u2019s official. Litecoin<\/a>, one of the oldest and biggest altcoins by market cap<\/a>, deployed Segregated<\/a> Witness<\/a> (SegWit<\/a>) today. The protocol upgrade that was originally developed for Bitcoin and proposed by the Bitcoin Core<\/a> development team locked in on Litecoin two weeks ago, and was enforced by a majority of hash power on the Litecoin network as of a couple of hours ago.<\/p>\n

The Segregated Witness soft fork activated without major issues \u2014 though there was an early slip up by the biggest Litecoin mining pool on the network.<\/p>\n

\u201cF2Pool had a hiccup where they were not mining Litecoin correctly. For some reason their LTC pool was returning a BTC template to miners. We reached out to them and they fixed it right away,\u201d Litecoin inventor Charlie Lee told Bitcoin Magazine.<\/em><\/p>\n

SegWit<\/strong><\/p>\n

Launched in 2011, Litecoin was one of the first altcoins to gain significant traction. As opposed to some newer altcoins like Ethereum<\/a>, Ripple<\/a> and Monero<\/a>, Litecoin is a straight fork of Bitcoin\u2019s codebase but with a different mining algorithm and some changed parameters, such as faster confirmation times. This similarity to Bitcoin does mean that Litecoin suffers from similar weaknesses as Bitcoin, like transaction malleability<\/a>. <\/p>\n

And, indeed, that it can adopt similar solutions and improvements, like Segregated Witness.<\/p>\n

While Litecoin inventor Charlie Lee has been advocating for activation of the soft fork since late 2016, miner support initially did not follow. This changed following the Global LTC Roundtable Meeting, an online meeting held amongst prominent stakeholders in the Litecoin industry, who are based particularly in China. The participants agreed on \u201cLitecoin Global Roundtable Resolution 001 (2017)<\/a>,\u201d which, among other things, holds that the mining pools<\/a> would activate SegWit.<\/p>\n

With its SegWit activation, the \u201csilver to Bitcoin\u2019s gold\u201d has immediately reclaimed a place in the spotlight, and the markets have been taking notice. Having lingered in Bitcoin\u2019s shadow for years at price levels below $5, Litecoin\u2019s exchange rate surged almost tenfold in anticipation of SegWit. The altcoin reached almost $40 today and is trading around $33 at time of publication.<\/p>\n

Bitcoin<\/strong><\/p>\n

Perhaps even more important, some prominent Bitcoin projects \u2014 like .NET Bitcoin library NBitcoin<\/a> and wallet mSIGNA<\/a> \u2014 announced to port their work to Litecoin now that it has enabled SegWit. Even more notable, Lightning Labs<\/a> will roll out a version of their lightning network<\/a> implementation on Litecoin, while ACINQ<\/a> has tested their lightning software on the altcoin, too. Similarly, Bitcoin Core developer Johnson Lau<\/a>, one of the authors of SegWit, has indicated that he will realize smart-contracting solution MAST<\/a> on Litecoin. <\/p>\n

Further down the road, Segregated Witness enables more innovations that could be deployed on Litecoin first. Confidential<\/a> Transactions<\/a>, Schnorr signatures<\/a> and TumbleBit<\/a> are all in the works for Bitcoin, and shouldn\u2019t take too much effort to port to Litecoin. <\/p>\n

Lee himself, furthermore, hopes<\/a> that atomic swaps will soon see the light of day, enabling an instant and trustless altcoin exchange and lightning network type of transactions across different digital currencies. <\/p>\n

\u201cSegWit opens up the doors to many amazing features that can be added to Litecoin,\u201d Lee said. \u201cThese include Lightning Network, MAST, Confidential Transactions, Schnorr Signatures and more. I think Litecoin can show Bitcoin that SegWit is indeed the best way to improve the protocol. So I think it will help get that happening sooner on Bitcoin.\u201d<\/p>\n

Segregated Witness is still pending activation on Bitcoin, where it requires 95 percent hash power support. It has stagnated at around 30 percent<\/a> so far.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It\u2019s official. Litecoin, one of the oldest and biggest altcoins by market cap, deployed Segregated Witness (SegWit) today. The protocol upgrade that was originally developed for Bitcoin and proposed by the Bitcoin Core development team locked in on Litecoin two weeks ago, and was enforced by a majority of hash power on the Litecoin network […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2509,"featured_media":23872,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[35],"tags":[1746,1662,3343,1079],"class_list":["post-23871","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-technical","tag-altcoins","tag-block-size","tag-litecoin","tag-segwit"],"author_data":{"id":2509,"name":"Aaron van Wirdum","nicename":"aaron-van-wirdum","avatar_url":"https:\/\/bitcoinmagazine.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/12\/aaron-van-wirdum-96x96.jpg"},"featured_image_url":"https:\/\/bitcoinmagazine.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/11\/litecoin-has-now-deployed-segregated-witness.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bitcoinmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23871","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bitcoinmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bitcoinmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bitcoinmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2509"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bitcoinmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=23871"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bitcoinmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23871\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bitcoinmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/23872"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bitcoinmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=23871"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bitcoinmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=23871"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bitcoinmagazine.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=23871"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}