The SegWit signaling has fallen back to 68 - 69%. One could postulate that all spare capacity for mining LTC was already brought onboard with the recent price increase. And that Bitmain will gradually eat away at that by producing more L3s which they keep for themselves to mine on LTC and block SegWit. The competitors may not have much resources as Bitmain, or just the fact that the L3 is twice as efficient as the A4 competition. I am not sure if that is the only scenario though. Maybe BTCC hasn't yet unleashed their GPU farm on LTC because perhaps they want to wait for a higher price. Maybe they want to stimulate one more price pump before making their move. There have been
hacking attacks that have moved hashrate to different pools. So I don't know if a similar attack has been employed on LTC pools. I noticed some significant change in the LTC pool distribution compared to yesterday.
https://web.archive.org/web/20170406082911/https://www.litecoinpool.org/poolshttps://web.archive.org/web/20170405041023/https://www.litecoinpool.org/poolsI had the thought that even if SegWit doesn't get activated, Litecoin has 4X more capacity in its blocks than Bitcoin, so it will have lower transaction fees. Yet I don't know if that would be compelling enough without real scaling.
Edit: Okay I was mistaken in thinking the activation period was only 24 hours. It is 2 weeks:
https://www.reddit.com/r/litecoin/comments/63nb70/how_long_does_it_need_to_be_over_75_before/Edit#2: Ah I see it must be a specific retarget period!
Lock-in: If 75% of blocks within any retarget period signal support for segwit, it locks-in. SegWit transactions are now opt-in.
Activate: After another 8064-block (roughly two week) retarget period, segwit will activate, allowing miners to produce blocks containing segwit transactions on Litecoin’s mainnet.
Thus perhaps we can expect that BTCC won't throw its GPUs at LTC mining until the next block retargeting! Important find.
The next block retargeting begins in ~30 hours, and the following confirms the two week activation period:
Next block retarget (4 per activation period)
Since a retarget period is roughly 3.5 days, that means the prior 3.5 day retargeting period did not start with ~69% signaling.
So I conclude that we might see fireworks ~30 hours from now.
To be technical, ASIC miner CHIP manufacturing on the 14/16nm node is in either Taiwan (TSMC fab with input or part-ownership by Samsung) or New York State of the US (Global Founderies, ex-IBM fab) at this point.
Ah yes, I remember this from when I was researching mobile-CPU friendly PoW hash function designs in 2016, that Samsung had an advantage on 14nm chips for mobile.
Bitmain in particular has shown a LOT of issues with getting enough chips to make miners with- when you have LARGE companies like NVidia and AMD having availability shortages on their new cards that they plan to sell millions of, a small company like Bitmain has to settle for what capasity is left over (and keep in mind that AMD has long-term contracts locking in capasity at Global Founderies due to the ex-AMD fabs being part OF Global Founderies dating back to it's foundation and their sale TO GF by AMD - and a lot of the rest of GF capasity is locked into IBM for the SAME reason).
So doesn't this favor my hypothesis that Litecoin's price rise means ASIC supply is constrained thus hashrate will not rise as fast as price does, and thus older 28nm stock should come into mining and it should signal SegWit, because those guys want to remain profitable at higher prices.
I see that there are still a couple of KNC Titan Scrypt miners for sale on ebay. And as the price is rising the A2 Dominators are becoming viable to mine with. I see a shit load of A2s for sale on ebay at really cheap prices ($200, etc). You can practically but them for nothing and when the price rises enough you could flip then for a profit I bet. I haven't actually run the calculation to see at what price the A2s are generating enough profit.
