Charlie Lee Sums Up Litecoin’s 10 Years History. Part Four: SegWit Activation
13 Outubro 2021 - 6:25AM
NEWSBTC
Today is the day, Litecoin’s 10th anniversary. Congratulations to
Charlie Lee and everyone involved in the project over the years. We
are exploring Litecoin’s history through the eyes of its creator.
We covered its fair launch, the long-hard road to exchanges
adopting LTC, and we introduced the SegWit story. It’s time to
finish it. The last time, we introduced Bitmain’s co-founder
Jihan Wu. Reportedly, he was singlehandedly stopping SegWit
adoption in the Bitcoin blockchain. Lee’s plan was to use Litecoin
as a Testnet of sorts for SegWit. “I realized that here’s a chance
for Litecoin to do something to help Bitcoin. If we can get SegWit
on Litecoin, it can clear out all the FUD and prove that SegWit is
safe and a good upgrade for Bitcoin.” To accomplish that, he had to
convince miners to side with him and not with the manufacturer of
the most efficient ASICs. Related Reading | New To Bitcoin? Learn
To Trade Crypto With The NewsBTC Trading Course According to
Coindesk, there was another important incentive for Litecoin to
adopt SegWit: “Since SegWit could potentially pave the way for
technologies that expand the value proposition of cryptocurrencies,
the move toward accepting the upgrade has reignited excitement
around the normally less-popular cryptocurrency. Litecoin’s price
has nearly tripled since the end of March as a result.” And this is
where today’s story starts. LTC price chart for 10/13/2021 on FX |
Source: LTC/USD on TradingView.com Charlie Lee Talks To Litecoin‘s
Miners During the end of 2016 and the beginning of 2012, Lee talked
to everyone. One of his first victories was to get “Innosilicon,
another LTC ASIC maker,” to his side. In this part of the story, we
can see how hard Jihan Wu was playing. A “huge LTC Miner” was ready
to signal for SegWit in principle, but, since his machines were in
a farm controlled by Jihan Wu, he was afraid that he might lose
access to cheap electricity. Innosilicon was immediately on board
with SegWit. They agreed with me that it's the best path forward.
And they were able to convince some of their customers to support
SegWit. One of their customers was a huge LTC miner. He owned about
5% of the hashrate. Having him was huge. — Charlie Lee
(@SatoshiLite) October 8, 2021 The objective was to get “75% of
blocks signal for SegWit within a 2-week timeframe.” Easier said
than done. LitecoinPool was the first great pool to side with
SegWit. Another big mining pool, F2pool, also promised to do it,
but they didn’t right away. This turned out to be great for the
cause because they provided a clear signal that the market
supported the SegWit transition. Lee narrates, “over the next
month, F2pool actually flipped flopped. They would signal and then
stop signaling. The market reacted accordingly. When F2pool started
signaling, the price will go up, and vice versa.” To
complicate things, “Jihan wanted me to personally visit him and the
miners in China to convince them about SegWit.” Lee didn’t like the
power-play, but that was nothing. As more and more miners signaled
for SegWit, Jihan turned to the ace up his sleeve. There was a
rumor that “Bitmain was building a ton of LTC miners and was going
to turn them all on themselves to block the upgrade.” Over the next
week, more and more miners started signaling for SegWit and it
started to look inevitable. And then this happened. Bitmain was
building a ton of LTC miners and was going to turn them all on
themselves to block the upgrade. 😡https://t.co/Zvs9srExJJ — Charlie
Lee (@SatoshiLite) October 8, 2021 It was time for Charlie Lee to
call in the big guns. The User Activated Soft Fork Since both the
miners and the market were clearly signaling in support of SegWit,
Charlie Lee felt he had the right “to pull the UASF trump card
out.” One of the wonders of decentralized organizations is that the
users can also activate a soft fork. “If the majority of users and
exchanges run the UASF code, SegWit will activate.” If that
happened, miners had to comply and adopt SegWit as well. UASF
stands for User Activated Soft Fork. What it means is that instead
of having the soft fork (SegWit) being miner activated, the user
decides to activate the soft fork in a future date. If the majority
of users and exchanges run the UASF code, SegWit will activate. —
Charlie Lee (@SatoshiLite) October 8, 2021 The threat of a UASF was
too much to bear, so the miners agreed to meet with Charlie Lee
online and work things out. Yes we will do roundtable online
with @SatoshiLite ASAP, not need to wait for June.
https://t.co/rVWQjLu5kJ — Jiang Zhuoer BTC.TOP (@JiangZhuoer) April
20, 2017 And the rest is history, “On April 21, I met with Jihan,
Innosilicon, and miners for over 8 hours IIRC. It was exhausting.“
They reached an agreement, this is the blog post announcing it.
Among other things, it says: “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.” Charlie Lee reflects, “Although this seems so bad
for a decentralized cryptocurrency to have a closed door meeting to
make decisions that affect the future of Litecoin, I felt like it
was a compromise I’m willing to take. It’s better than an all out
war between the miners and I.” On May 10th, 2017, SegWit was
activated on Litecoin. SegWit has activated on Litecoin! 💥😁
pic.twitter.com/lpeklpQpZe — Charlie Lee (@SatoshiLite) May 10,
2017 After that, a few historic transactions took place On THE SAME
DAY, a notorious Bitcoin developer completed the first Lightning
Network transaction. A few days later, Lee posted an anonymous “$1m
bounty on a SegWit address:” The text says: “A lot of people have
been saying that segwit is unsafe because segwit coins are
“anyone-can-spend” and can be stolen. So lets put this to the test.
I put up $1MM of LTC into a segwit address. You can see it’s a
segwit address because I sent and spent 1 LTC first to reveal the
redeemscript.” A few months later, Bitcoin activated SegWit through
a UASF. “It’s hard to know exactly how much Litecoin helped with
this. I feel like it definitely has helped.” Days later, Charlie
Lee and Strike’s Jack Mallers starred in the first Lightning
Network request/ payment transaction on Litecoin. That man Jack
Mallers has a way to get involved in historic transactions, like
this one, and this one. That same month, Lee did his first Atomic
Swap transaction. “This shows how one can move coins between
different chains in a decentralized way. It was a great proof of
concept and paved the way for decentralized exchanges.” And later,
he did another Atomic Swap but this time with Bitcoin. And the next
month, Lee did “the first ever cross-chain swap between BTC and LTC
via Lightning.” This time it was with the now world-famous
Lightning Labs. Related Reading | Binance Burns Record $600 Million
BNB In Its 15th Quarter Wasn’t that an amazing, amazing story? We
learned so much. And, even though we said this was the last chapter
in the Litecoin 10-year history, Charlie Lee has another story to
tell. Join us tomorrow for the infamous story of Charlie selling
all of his Litecoin. Another legendary moment in crypto land.
Featured Image: Charlie Lee's picture from this tweet | Charts by
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