{"id":111688,"date":"2019-08-11T04:21:08","date_gmt":"2019-08-11T11:21:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cryptoslate.com\/?p=111688"},"modified":"2024-03-10T18:53:01","modified_gmt":"2024-03-10T18:53:01","slug":"charlie-lee-litecoin-development-alive-and-well","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cryptoslate.com\/charlie-lee-litecoin-development-alive-and-well\/","title":{"rendered":"Charlie Lee refutes that Litecoin is “being abandoned,” active development continues"},"content":{"rendered":"

Charlie Lee asserted<\/a> Litecoin development is alive and well. Meanwhile, reports based on the project's GitHub numbers suggest it is \u201cbeing abandoned.\u201d<\/p>\n

GitHub numbers suggest Litecoin is being abandoned?<\/h2>\n

Litecoin<\/a> has continued to receive scrutiny for its perceived lack of new code development. Electric Capital said Litecoin was “being abandoned,” with the project experiencing a precipitous drop in development activity.<\/p>\n

In the venture fund's March 2019 report<\/a>,\u00a0Electric Capital cross-analyzed top cryptocurrency projects and concluded Litecoin was \u201cbeing abandoned.\u201d The study cited figures showing a precipitous drop in the project\u2019s GitHub commits alongside monthly active developers falling from 40 developers to 3 within 2019.<\/p>\n

Charlie Lee<\/a> directly refutes this supposed lack of development activity. Lee claims Litecoin\u2019s GitHub numbers are do not accurately represent the work the team has done for Litecoin in 2019.<\/p>\n

Numbers don\u2019t tell the whole story<\/h2>\n

Litecoin has a small group of core developers. Include Lee, the team has six developers who consistently work on the project\u2019s codebase.<\/p>\n

Litecoin\u2019s code is \u201ckept very close\u201d to Bitcoin\u2019s. This means upgrades from Bitcoin are systematically integrated into Litecoin\u2019s. As a result, only one lead developer needs to merge new code into the project\u2019s code base while the rest of the team performs supporting roles, said Lee.<\/p>\n

Another factor that negatively affects Litecoin\u2019s appearance is how GitHub assigns dates for new contributions. Much of the project\u2019s recent code was \u201cmostly written in 2018,\u201d even though the work was modified and incorporated in 2019. GitHub marks the work as if it was done in 2018. Consequently, for those unaware, it would appear \u201cLitecoin developers took the year off,\u201d but this is untrue asserted Lee.<\/p>\n

Another factor working against Litecoin\u2019s appearances is how the team manages updates to the master branch\u2014the main version\u2014of the project. For high-stakes software like a cryptocurrency, it\u2019s important to ensure new code is battle-tested to minimize potential damage to stakeholders.<\/p>\n

As a result, Charlie Lee and his team don\u2019t tend to work on the master branch of the project. Instead, the team is working on Litecoin Core release 0.18.1 on a personal branch of one of the devs. When the version is merged into the master branch then GitHub will suddenly register all of the development done in 2019.<\/p>\n

Just looking at the numbers it\u2019s not unreasonable to assume the project is inactive. However, with awareness of Litecoin's development process it's clear the project is far from “being abandoned.”<\/p>\n

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10\/ This is how Litecoin Core development has functioned for years. We even had the same FUD last year! Someone looked at our master branch last year and claimed that Litecoin stopped developing in 2018. And I bet even after this explanation, we will have people confused in 2020.<\/p>\n

— Charlie Lee \u24c2\ufe0f\ud83d\udd78\ufe0f (@SatoshiLite) August 11, 2019<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n