On April 20, Charlie Lee, Litecoin founder and Coinbase Director of Engineering, announced that Jiang Zhou’er, the founder and operator of a major Litecoin mining pool, was planning to mine several Segregated Witness (SegWit) blocks to test the pool’s system and stop signaling SegWit after the initial testing phase.
Yet, Zhou’er’s Litecoin mining pool LTC1BTC is still mining SegWit blocks and signaling the activation of SegWit, according to various mining statistics providers.
Initially, Zhou’er planned to test his system and mining pool by signaling SegWit. He intended to stop after mining a few blocks. On April 21 however, the Litecoin mining community and industry released the “Litecoin Global Roundtable Resolution 001” to portray the general consensus of both the mining community and the industry to the public. The resolution noted that the Litecoin community came to a consensus to mine SegWit blocks and signal for the activation of the solution.
Following the resolution and the community’s vision, Zhou’er has continued to mine SegWit blocks and signal his support toward the scaling solution.
Discussion with Charlie Lee
Charlie Lee participated in the Global Litecoin Roundtable Meeting to discuss the activation of SegWit on Litecoin. As one of the key figures of the community, Lee played a major role in convincing the mining community to activate SegWit for Litecoin scalability.
By this rate, SegWit on Litecoin will be activated after another activation period, after 8,064 blocks. If the current 75.79 percent threshold continues to be sustained, SegWit will be locked in by the sixth activation period and SegWit will officially be integrated into Litecoin.
Most mining pools that are mining or signaling SegWit on Litecoin plan to push SegWit on Bitcoin if it performs as expected on the Litecoin network. Major Bitcoin mining pools such as F2Pool have publicly announced that they intend to signal SegWit on Bitcoin once its applicability and features are tested on Litecoin.
Even Bitmain’s Antpool, which has been the most vocal opposer of Bitcoin Core and SegWit, is currently signaling SegWit on Litecoin. Thus, Antpool could potentially signal SegWit on Bitcoin if it sees its potential on Litecoin.
At the moment, SegWit activation on Bitcoin is nowhere close from being executed. Only 34.1 percent of the Bitcoin mining network are in support of SegWit. Mining pools including Bitfury, BTCC, F2Pool and Slush Pool are actively pushing the integration of SegWit into Bitcoin.
In the contrary, some of the larger mining pools such as Antpool and BTC.Top are signaling their support for the Bitcoin Unlimited software, for undisclosed motives.
While some believe Antpool’s opposition to SegWit is their method of eliminating the potential of blocking AsicBoost deactivation, Antpool’s covert usage of AsicBoost has not been proven as of yet.