On April 21, Litecoin creator and Coinbase Director of Engineering Charlie Lee urged Jihan Wu, the founder and CEO of Bitmain, the parent company of Litecoin and bitcoin mining pool Antpool, to signal the activation of Bitcoin Core’s scaling solution Segregated Witness (Segwit).
Almost immediately after the Litecoin mining community and industry released the Litecoin Global Roundtable Resolution 001, the results of the Global LTC Roundtable Meeting established to eliminate any misunderstandings and conflicts within the industry and community, Lee wrote:
Ball is now in your court Jihan Wu and Jiang Zhuoer. Let’s signal for SegWit and give the people what they want!
Mining pools and businesses including BATPool, bitmain, BW.com, CHBTC.com, F2Pool, Huobi, OKCoin and LTC1BTC came to a consensus that a major protocol upgrade such as Segwit should be implemented under majority community consensus.
“We agree that protocol upgrade should be made under community consensus, and should not be unilateral action of developers nor miners. We advocate that Litecoin protocol upgrade decision should be made based on the needs of the users, through the roundtable meeting voting process, and activated by miner voting,” announced the members of the roundtable meeting.
During the meeting, mining pools and community members went through a transparent voting process to decide whether to support the activation of Segwit or disregard it. Ultimately, the Litecoin community came to an official consensus to support the activation of Segwit as soft fork on Litecoin.
“Through a voting process, the participating members unanimously agree to the following plan regarding to Litecoin protocol upgrade: To implement Segregated Witness softfork on Litecoin [and] when the usage of Litecoin block capacity is over 50%, we will start to prepare for a solution to increase the 1MB block size limit through a hardfork or soft fork,” the Litecoin community stated.
While the motive of mining pools such as Antpool and other previously Segwit-opposing miningg pools remain unclear, the Litecoin Global Roundtable Resolution revealed that the Litecoin mining community is agains the concept of a user-activated soft fork, which completely disregards miners and mining pools by making a major decision amongst users and node operators.
A more logical explanation of the Litecoin mining community’s consensus toward the activation of Segwit is that the community felt threatened by the support for the activation of UASF, which essentially reduces the power and authority of miners over the network.
“We do not advocate a flag-day “UASF” that does not go though any users or community voting process. This type of forced upgrade without community consensus put Litecoin in a risk of split. We condemn any illegal aggressive acts like DDoS,” Litecoin miners added.
Can Bitcoin Learn from Litecoin?
There exists two main learning points from the Litecoin community’s recent consensus to activate Segwit. The first point is that while the community is decentralized, it is cooperative and collaborative, unlike the bitcoin community. Secondly, the Litecoin community has a moderator-like figure in Charlie Lee who can unify the community bring it to a consensus to solve major network issues and scalability problems.
For the bitcoin network to scale efficiently, three communities of miners, users and developers must come to a consensus on a scaling solution, rather than leading a long-term conflict derived from egotistical viewpoint of the bitcoin network.
Currently, all mining pools of Litecoin are in support for Segwit apart from ViaLTC. Antpool and F2Pool are actively mining Segwit blocks on Litecoin.
Featured image from Shutterstock.
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