Bitcoin Forum

Why did litecoin manage to get SegWit so fast while bitcoin is still slow and painful.

The creator of litecoin Charlie Lee supported it, talked with the necessary people and implemented a plan that no one had any real issues with hence it was approved sealed and a done deal.
https://www.cryptocoinsnews.com/litecoin-creator-charlie-lee-urges-jihan-wu-to-signal-for-segwit-antpool-obliges/
(Also the transaction capacity was not near the 1MB limit yet so a lot less impact they have more time to study things later)
Bitcoin the foundation and other groups suggested it met pushback and hence we had a blockscale debate on the best implementation due to a variety of political monetary and strategic issues that scaling presented and the transaction limit was approaching so issues and debate hence drama.

Why did litecoin decided on a 50% vote while bitcoin had to go for a 95% vote?

It didn't.  All of the major Litecoin pools agreed to SegWit and the support went over 95%.

It was easier for Litecoin because it was smaller with less money involved, so people found it easier to reach consensus.  Plus, we can only speculate about what satoshi wants/would want, but Charlie Lee openly supported it.

Activation of Segwit depends upon consensus of miners. In case of LTC, all the number of miners were low and all of them were in favour of change (including founder) so it was pretty easy to apply.
But in case of BTC, number of miners are too high and everyone have different opinions. So if Segwit applied half heartly at 50-60% consensus, it may leads to opposite circumstances in BTC ecosystem like we see in "Democratic Countries regarding Government ".

"Democratic Countries regarding Government " nicely said, explains why sometimes things move faster at not so democratic countries  *cough* :)

That is because Litecoin is not yet corrupted from the inside by a Troyan horse called Unlimited, acting for anything but Bitcoin interest.

A lot of people in litecoins plus its miners want the best for litecoins. We know litecoin is not doing great in the market, and I feel it is undervalued. It was easier to implement segwit and get a consensus because almost everyone involved wants to see the coin gain value and it was an obviously good decision. The people involved in bitcoin are mostly driven by greed.

Your first statement sums up quite well the problem with reaching agreements especially ones that need to be nearly unanimous, the more parties there are to it the harder to gets and then big money always gets in the way.

Litecoin and Bitcoin, all things equal, just had a difference in scale. As so adequately explained, consensus was necessary for both networks, but easier to achieve in the considerably smaller ecosystem of Litecoin. Bitcoin also started out the same way, with the early, recognisable developers proposing ideas that everyone was happy to onboard. Litecoin will hope, I am sure, to grow to the point it will face the same issues Bitcoin has today.

It's simply the mark of maturity.

Altcoins are just test rats and it is once again proved when litecoin went forward to test a solution for scalability issue in real time scenario.
Probably litecoin might tried to get attention of crpto community (and especially investors) by adopting segwit but unfortunately it is still strucking under 0.02BTC levels yet.

The activation of SegWit in the Litecoin network came so fast and without any dramatic ups and downs all because all of the stakeholders agreed to adopt it...and the same thing can not be said on Bitcoin. So what hampered the implementation of that in Bitcoin is actually the failure to reach the needed consensus. Hopefully, this whole mess can be over soon as this is getting to be a dark cloud hanging over Bitcoin for a long time. A good solution has to come otherwise Bitcoin would suffer greatly.

We all understand that there are so many self-vested interests working now in the Bitcoin community and some are putting up factions to counteract another group with different suggestions and ideas to solve the scaling problem. The idea that they can have a sit down and have a heart-to-heart talks seem foreign to them...until that recent consensus arrived in New York.

Unlike litecoin bitcoin has no center and its creator was hiding in the shadows and does not appear in public. This is one of the major reasons why activating segwit will take a very long time. Another thing is that there are different groups having different sides and will have their own code and will not stick to segwit. To make segwit activated there is a need for a consensus, but a consensus is very hard to get thus UASF is created to make sure that everything will be in favor of the bitcoin holders. With UASF in the picture segwit activation has become possible. But in order to reach that far the bitcoin community has encountered many problems and challenges.

If SegWit2X is activated will UASF be dropped?

two main reasons.
* LTC didn't activate SegWit for capacity increase since it never needed that part. it activated SegWit for many other benefits.
* there is no fight over power in LTC but there is a big one coming from the BU camp trying to take control and that is why they are stalling.


no the threshold was 75% for litecoin not 50%. and as other poster said the support went above 95% and nearly was 100%

it depends on many things actually, but since SegWit2x and UASF both will reject non SegWit blocks and SegWit2x is activating SegWit i think it will (i am not 100% sure though). as i said it depends on many things like if they continue signalling for SegWit to the end or will they change their position, or are they going to use the same bit version for it.

The reason for the fast turn around was Charlie Lee stood up and made a decision to make it a priority to make changes and had a meeting with all the parties involved in mining and came to a decision that it could support their vision and follow their path and that is how things changed quickly for them.

I believe the main reasons were the founders very strong position on it, the smaller market/Money involved, and the fact that bitcoin was very low value and holders saw it as na oppurtunity to make more Money fast. They got it right apparently.

Maybe because LTC is more centralized than we thought before? or perhaps only 2 large mining farms have more than 80% of total hash power?
I think it was a good thing to happen because now every time Bitcoin disappoints us we could move to LTC and slowly pump it's price just like the past 3 months.

Maybe Charlie Lee and the whole LTC community thought it might be a better idea to be first in the market with Segwit and its benefits. Judging by the reaction of the crypto market in general, I would say they recieved it well. LTC went from under $10 months ago to $40 now.

I think at time LTC SegWit, Bitcoin have some issue about Blockchain and Hardfolk, some people hear LTC SegWit and it make they interesting. After, a huge number people from Bitcoin go to LTC and waiting the time LTC can replace BTC, but it just a dream created by devs and whale of LTC give to community!

That's what I am saying. In non-Democratic countries you have nothing to do with public consent, all you need to do is set a policy and people have to follow them. But in case of democratic countries you have to look after the view of every person. That's why decision don't move faster. Similarly in case of bitcoin, Segwit activation is difficult because we have to look after views of every miner.

Why would you ever call that democracy?

As to me, what we have now in Bitcoin can hardly be called democracy at all. It is more like a tyranny of the few, a tyranny of the group of a dozen miners who grabbed all the power and are not going to give it up without a fight. If anything, Litecoin has a lot more democracy than Bitcoin, and likely because of that SegWit got activated so fast and without any drama. In my opinion, we can roughly equal the level of "democracy" in a coin to how well it is decentralized, i.e. the more decentralized a coin is, the more "democratic" it will be. Obviously, Litecoin is a clear winner if we take that as the basis for comparison with Bitcoin

The creator/head developer of litecoin wanted/supported it, that's why it was implemented immediately. Whereas on bitcoin, since it was more decentralized, the community was split into 2 groups. hardforkers and softforkers. They have been debating for months, hence there was no real progress. Gotta watch out for August 1 though, UASF is makin a move. As of now we don't know what's gonna happen though. Maybe a chain-split.

I see nothing democratic or decentralized about segwit and LN since they both go together.
You need a third party to administer LN and that means a governing central body is being introduced into crypto which is exactly what Satoshi tried to remove.
I'm all for bitcoin unlimited, let's increase the block size and continue being decentralized.

Was that sarcasm or am I missing something?

The big blockers are criticized specifically for making Bitcoin more centralized in practice (despite what they themselves claim). Big blocks lead to more expensive operation of full nodes, so less people will be running them and thus more power will go to miners which means more centralization. Apart from that, larger blocks require more time to propagate across the network, so the Chinese miners will get an undeserved advantage (due to accumulation of hashing power), up to a point where one miner can generate blocks so big that he can spend considerable time finding the next block while the previous one is still in the wires, so to speak. I don't really know how that could be interpreted as "continuation of being decentralized"

Unlike bitcoin, litecoin is a well known currency, but it does not have breakthrough developments, even if it's not popular, segwit can help litecoin thrive. The reason for the litecoin's segwit is quickly accepted.

Bitcoin block size limit at 1MB is becaming a really bad thing on a short time.
In this matter, pleases to see how ltc went fast through this.

Let us say that the number of transaction of litecoin is not that huge like bitcoin,accept the fact,for a decentralized currency like bitcoin you need to have all the challenges and the developer came forward to talk to all the miners and so is the reason we could see a sudden upgrade.

Charlie Lee managed to get everyone on board somehow. The fact that he speaks chinese is I guess a way to connect with them. He probably (and dangerously) promised miners some sort of blocksize increase in the future...

This shows Litecoin is not really decentralized because it needed a leader to get everyone agreeing.

Litecoin already has Lightning Network

So I doubt there will ever be a need for a block size increase. Anyway, even today Litecoin has an effective block size of 4 megabytes (if we take into account the mean time between confirmations). That basically means that Litecoin can confirm 4x more transactions than Bitcoin right out of the box. Apart from that, I don't think that Litecoin is less decentralized than Bitcoin just because there is an active leader and everyone agrees to changes proposed. It just means that people behind Litecoin are more reasonable overall. And if I'm not mistaken, Jihan was also against activating SegWit in Litecoin at first, but he likely had no other choice but to comply with the majority

Maybe weith SegWit2X we will see bitcoin heading to 4mb, hence as fast as litecoin.

The fact is transactions count can't grow past computational capacity.

LITECOIN was the silver to Bitcoin and was ready to take the limelight off of it's older Brother Bitcoin. This was the chance it took and it was wise for all the miners to just go ahead and accept SEGWIT. Also I guess being a smaller entity really helped as well.