Feb 13, 2017 at 13:05 // News

Daniel Dabek Author

Charlie Lee urges the Litecoin Mining community to support the Segregated Witness Activation proposal now and open the blockchain frontier to amazing new possibilities.

The Litecoin community has a chance to activate the Segregated Witness technology and open a new paradigm for blockchain technology. Charlie, founder and lead developer of Litecoin, urges the mining community to adopt his proposal and open the world to the new advantages that come with SegWit implementation.

Coinidol.com interviewed Charlie Lee about the SegWit development, he said:

“I think SegWit is a huge improvement to Litecoin and I would like to see it activated. Please support SegWit in any way you can.”

There are many advantages that Segregated Witness opens up for the entire blockchain community. If adopted, Litecoin will be the first live and valuable blockchain network that has activated the technology and its possibilities.

Segregated Witness is a huge improvement to Litecoin

Segregated Witness enables the change that will enable the blockchain community to remove centralized exchanges, and activate atomic exchange. Which means that traders and people will be able to exchange Bitcoins for Litecoins and other blockchain coins without using a third party.



Charlie Lee told Coinidol.com about it:



“With Lightning Network on both [Bitcoin and Litecoin], atomic swap via Lightning Network becomes really easy. There will definitely be decentralized exchanges after that.”



Furthermore, Charlie Lee expresses his excitement to work on the Lightning Network:



“Lightning Network opens up a million possibilities and I’m excited to work with the Lightning Network devs to explore them.”



Lightning Network opens up a million possibilities



Another case for Litecoin’s adoption of Segregated Witness is that it will show to other developers what it can do in a live setting. While it is a substantially tested technology, this could be the first live usage of Segregated Witness which is valuable information for the Bitcoin community that is in a debate about whether to integrate SegWit as well.



Charlie Lee explained what it will take to activate Segregated Witness on Litecoin:



“To activate SegWit on Litecoin, miners need to signal for it in the blocks they mine. Within a 2 week period, if 75% of blocks signal for SegWit, then it's locked it and will activate after 2 weeks.”



There is an extensive debate in the Bitcoin community about how to increase the capacity of transaction processing. One of the leading proposals for addressing the issue is Segregated Witness, a protocol that reduces the size of a transaction, therefore allowing more of them to be included in blocks which means more transactions.



Bitcoin has a lot to gain from Litecoin SegWit activation





According to Charlie Lee, Creator of Litecoin and ex-Director of Engineering at Coinbase:



“I do believe having SegWit activate on Litecoin will help make that possible on Bitcoin too.

Because SegWit is such a big update, users and miners might prefer to try it out on a coin that has a smaller market cap and Litecoin is a perfect coin for this….

Although SegWit has been tested extensively on testnet, that’s not the same as testing on a network where transactions are moving real value.”

So far the improvement has been tested in contained environments and no blockchain that has a higher monetary value has implemented the system to date. Litecoin is a first proposal and could provide a proof of the concept.



Additionally, this implementation makes it possible to create atomic swaps between different blockchains’ coins which means that the ownership of coins of different blockchains could be swapped without a third party as an intermediary. This will be able to bring cryptocurrencies into a more trustworthy condition because centralized exchanges would be unnecessary, improving conditions for the altcoin marketplace.



“If the lead developer of the project is proposing to go forward, considering the risks and having tested the implementation; then it could provide an incredible step forward in blockchain innovation and development. Altcoin traders and miners should be able to convince each other to adopt this solution,” by Daniel Dabek, founder and architect, Safe Exchange Coin.