As of right now, there is a lot of discussion among Litecoin enthusiasts regarding SegWit and the UASF. Even though the activating of SegWit has been achieved successfully, certain mining pool operators continue to do everything they can to block it. It seems they are bringing mining hardware online that will effectively disrupt SegWit activation as a whole. A rather dubious turn of events, although it is not hard to find the culprit.
Jihan Wu Strikes Again
In the bitcoin world, everyone is well aware of how Jihan Wu is by far the largest opponent of Segregated Witness. He joined forces with Roger Ver to push Bitcoin Unlimited to users and companies, even though there is no economic support whatsoever. Now that they can’t have their solution succeed, it is evident all they want is to prevent bitcoin from scaling altogether. As a result, there is a standstill on the bitcoin network, with no scaling solution even close to activation.
Litecoin seemingly had avoided all of these problems, as various mining pools supported SegWit signaling from day one. With more hashpower supporting SegWit compared to opposing it, the activation threshold was met a few days ago. Unfortunately, there is no reason to celebrate just yet, as it looks like the war is only just beginning. In fact, it appears the hashrate in favor of Segregated Witness is starting to fall behind the curve, thanks to a few mining pools.
It is anything but surprising to learn the pools opposing SegWit on Litecoin are controlled by the same people who block Segwit for Bitcoin. Considering how one of these pools is owned by a hardware manufacturer, they can easily bring more mining power online to stall activation of this scaling solution. As of right now, that is exactly what is happening, thanks to Jihan Wu and a few of his buddies.
So far, there is no major cause for concern just yet, as the threshold is still being met. 76.77% of blocks found during this activation period have been signaling SegWit, which is above the required 75% threshold. However, it is evident someone is willingly pushing down the hashrate in support of this solution and it is not hard to look where the opposition is coming from. Jihan Wu has no interest in doing what is best for the cryptocurrency, he only wants to make a lot of money by preventing scaling solutions from activating.
One silver lining is how, even if SegWit activation fails, Litecoin can still implement the user-activated soft fork as well. Similarly to how Bitcoin, there is plenty of support for SegWit, but not enough to rely on just the miners for activation. A UASF may be coming to Litecoin a lot sooner than people think, as this remains the only viable course of action if the activation threshold is no longer met. It will be interesting to see what happens in the Litecoin ecosystem moving forward, as it will give insights as to how the bitcoin scaling debate may evolve as well.
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