SegWit Signaling: How's It Going?

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2017-02-05 10:24 UTC (4 years ago)

SegWit signaling successfully started two days ago, on February 3 at about 9:33 UTC. So far, adoption has been low (about 3%), mainly because only 3 pools (Coinotron, LitecoinPool.org, and Multipool) are signaling. Judging from block headers, most pools haven't yet upgraded to the latest version of Litecoin, which is needed for SegWit signaling. With the exception of LTC1BTC, however, none has shown hostility to the SegWit soft fork, so there's reason to believe that this upgrade will be eventually carried out.

Here are the most recent results of our internal SegWit support vote: so far, 237 of our miners have expressed their preference. By hash rate, 22.7% have voted Yes, while 1.6% have voted No. The large majority of active miners is still abstaining.

Update (2017-02-10): 251 votes so far. By hash rate, 22.0% Yes, 1.6% No.

We've noticed that there has been some confusion about the meaning and workings of our SegWit support vote, so we think some clarification is in order.

The idea behind the vote is to give our miners the power to signal as if they were mining solo (only pools and solo miners can actually signal). That is, instead of forcing a decision of them, we gave each of them the right to decide independently. This vote was organized solely for the sake of fairness, and a hypothetical delay in SegWit activation would not benefit the pool or its operators in any way.

This is not a majority vote; on the contrary, it is fully proportional, as that is the only way to simulate the signaling of independent solo miners. The pool's signaling ratio will change constantly, based on each miner's vote and hash rate. Because of this, a miner voting 'Yes' contributes to SegWit activation exactly as much as if mining solo or at a pool signaling with 100% of their blocks.

As previously announced, abstentions will eventually be counted as “no objection” (positive) votes, and given the overwhelming majority of users voting 'Yes' so far, we see this happening sooner rather than later.

We will keep posting updates on the evolution of the vote on this page. Remember that you can check current network adoption on our Network Hash Rate Distribution page, where you can also see detailed block information.