Charlie Lee Sums Up Litecoin ‘s 10 Years History. Part Three: SegWit Intro
October 12 2021 - 04:42AM
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The last time we checked with Litecoin, its creator Charlie Lee
left Coinbase to focus on his own project. The mission at hand was
implementing SegWit in the Litecoin blockchain, which is easier
said than done. This story is as exciting as they come. It has
twists and turns and it ends with a bang. Through the following
tale, we’ll learn a lot about consensus. One of the most mysterious
aspects of the cryptocurrency space is how decisions are made. Are
you ready to learn through a practical example? Related Reading |
Charlie Lee Sums Up Litecoin’s 10 Years History. Part One: Fair
Launch But before we get into it, let’s let Mr. Lee himself define
SegWit: “SegWit stands for Segregated Witness. It’s basically an
upgrade that would separate out the signature (i.e. witness) from
the transaction.” By extracting the signature, transactions occupy
less space. So, each block can hold more transactions. SegWit
effectively increases the block size limit of the blockchain. That
being said, let’s get back to Litecoin ’s 10-year history. Why Did
Charlie Lee Wanted Litecoin To Implement SegWit? At the time, in
the Bitcoin network, miners were blocking SegWit. “Basically the
fear was that once SegWit is activated, miners can steal any coins
sent to SegWit addresses. Anyone technical enough knows that this
was not true.” So, Lee’s plan was to implement SegWit on Litecoin
to show everyone that the upgrade was safe, and thus help clear up
the FUD that surrounded it. Basically the fear was that once SegWit
is activated, miners can steal any coins sent to SegWit addresses.
Anyone technical enough knows that this was not true. It was not
possible for miners to steal coins that way. Unfortunately Bitcoin
testnet was not useful here. — Charlie Lee (@SatoshiLite) October
8, 2021 Bitcoin’s Testnet wasn’t helpful in this case because its
coins are worthless, so it doesn’t provide an incentive for bad
actors to attack it. It couldn’t “test out the game theory of the
blockchain.” On Litecoin, on the other hand, there would be
“incentives for people to attack it. If miners can steal millions
from anyone-can-spend coins, they would.” Besides helping Bitcoin
beat the FUD, Charlie Lee had other reasons to implement SegWit in
his project. “So you may wonder why I’m pushing for SegWit.
Litecoin does not have a block size problem. That’s right, and
SegWit is not just a block scaling solution. I would even say block
scaling is just a side benefit of SegWit. The main fix is
transaction malleability, which would allow Lightning Networks (LN)
to be built on top of Litecoin.” LTC price chart for 10/12/2021 on
Gemini | Source: LTC/USD on TradingView.com The Foundation Of The
Litecoin Foundation A quick subsection, because this series is
about Litecoin’s history. While the SegWit story evolved, Warren
Togami stepped down as lead developer. Shaolin Fry joined the team
specifically “to help us get SegWit activated on Litecoin.” Loshan
and Thrasher also joined to help with the code. Xinxi Wang
(@TheRealXinxi) and Franklyn Richards (@LitecoinDotCom) joined me
as Director to the Litecoin Foundation and we had Loshan
(@loshan1212) and Thrasher (@thrasher_au) as developers working on
the code. People started to become excited about Litecoin again! —
Charlie Lee (@SatoshiLite) October 8, 2021 At the same time, they
created The Litecoin Foundation with Xinxi Wang, Franklyn Richards,
and Charlie Lee himself as Directors. Enter The Bad Guy Of The
Movie It’s time for the Litecoin and SegWit story to meet that
legendary period known as The Blocksize War. At the time, mining
was a relatively centralized affair and Bitmain was the… main
player. They produced the “most efficient ASICs” and miners were
heavily incentivized to vote with them… or else. “The
co-founder of Bitamin, Jihan Wu,is a big supporter of scaling
Bitcoin onchain,” Lee informs. That means, he was against SegWit
and against The Lightning Network as scaling solutions. Jihan Wu
was in the camp of simply forking Bitcoin to increase block sizes,
a notion that the community ended up rejecting. However, at the
time, Wu was singlehandedly stopping SegWit adoption in Bitcoin.
And he had great influence over Litecoin too. Unfortunately that
became very contentious. Because Jihan had a lot of influence, he
single-handedly was able to block SegWit activation on Bitcoin. And
because Bitmain also made one of the most efficient Litecoin
miners, he had a lot of influence on Litecoin miners also. —
Charlie Lee (@SatoshiLite) October 8, 2021 So, how could Charlie
Lee and his band of misfits circumvent this huge obstacle blocking
their way? “The difference between Bitcoin and Litecoin is me,” he
said. “Bitcoin is more decentralized. There’s no one to come out to
speak on what their vision of Bitcoin is.” Lee could and did
promote his support of SegWit among the miners and tried to seduce
some of them to vote his way. “Anyways, this was what I set out to
do. I met and talked to many miners throughout the end of 2016 to
early 2017.” Related Reading | New To Bitcoin? Learn To Trade
Crypto With The NewsBTC Trading Course We know that his plan
worked, but it was a lot harder than expected. Jihan Wu had the
resources and influence to render his efforts obsolete, plus he had
an ace up his sleeve. How did Charlie Lee proceeded? How did he
make SegWit on Litecoin happen and who stepped up to the plate to
help him? Find all of that and more in tomorrow’s next and final
episode of Litecoin ‘s 10-year history. Featured Image by
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