The Litecoin Core Client Still Doesn’t Create SegWit Transactions By Default

Controversy is never hard to come by in the world of cryptocurrencies. Litecoin successfully activated Segregated Witness on the network months ago. Interestingly enough, the Litecoin Core client doesn’t generate SegWit transactions by default. One would expect this to have changed by now, yet it hasn’t for some unknown reason. This begs the question if there are any SegWit transactions on the Ltiecoin network to date.

The LTC community was quite pleased when all mining pools came together to activate SegWit. After all, this scaling solution and malleability fix is quite important. Bitcoin users saw this as a way to test the scaling solution and draw their own conclusions. However, it seems things are not exactly going the way as planned. More specifically, Litecoin Core clients can’t generate SegWit transactions by default in release 0.13.2. Considering how this is the latest stable release, it poses a big problem.

Litecoin Core and SegWit Integration

While it is known a future version of Litecoin Core will solve this problem, some questions linger. Having SegWit activated on the network, but not in the Core client is very strange. After all, the goal is to test this solution thoroughly before it is activated on the Bitcoin mainnet. So far, it seems very little active testing has been done. That is quite problematic, considering many people Litecoin can overtake Bitcoin if the latter hits a snag when activating SegWit. Then again, this scaling proposal still remains largely untested on a live network to this very day.

It is important to keep in mind the current Litecoin Core client does support SegWit. However, accessing this feature requires a fair bit of tinkering. Having a default option would make much more sense, but we’ll need to wait for the next release to see that happen. Saying how Litecoin has proven SegWit is safe is definitely not correct at this stage. Once this protocol powers all network transactions, we can start drawing conclusions. Until then, there is no reason to think otherwise.

Additionally, it doesn’t mean there are no Litecoin SegWit transactions either. One Reddit user posted a spreadsheet of information regarding these transactions. It appears the overall number is still relatively small, even though things are picking up a bit as of late. One particular network bloc on July 11th even saw 100 SegWit transactions. That is quite a significant boost compared to a month or so ago. Segregated Witness usage is not as widespread within Litecoin as people would think. That said, things are evolving in the right direction, which is good to see.

Header image courtesy of Shutterstock