Charlie Lee’s Journey to Implement SegWit on Litecoin

After leaving Coinbase to focus on his own project, Charlie Lee’s first job was to implement SegWit on the Litecoin blockchain, but things weren’t as simple as expected. The story is quite interesting when Charlie Lee overcame a lot of difficulties to get a memorable touch. We will learn a lot about consent from the following narrative. One of the most mysterious aspects of crypto space is how decisions are made.

Charlie Lee – The creator of Litecoin

But before you dive into it, leave Lee define SegWit:

“SegWit stands for Segregated Witness (separate evidence). It’s basically an upgrade that separates the signature (i.e. evidence) from the transaction.

By extracting signatures, transactions take up less space. So each block can hold more transactions, and SegWit is effectively increasing the block size limit of the blockchain.

Why does Charlie Lee want Litecoin to implement SegWit?

At that time, miners blocked SegWit on the Bitcoin network. Charlie Lee tweets:

“Basically, they fear that after activating SegWit, miners will be able to steal coins that are sent to the SegWit address. Anyone who is tech-savvy enough knows that this is not true. ”

So Lee’s plan is to implement SegWit on Litecoin so everyone can see that the upgrade is safe and thus help make FUD spreads clear everywhere.

Bitcoin’s test network is not useful in this case as its coin is worthless so there is no incentive for bad guys to attack. It cannot “test the blockchain game theory”. For Litecoin, on the other hand, there will be “an incentive for people to attack the network. If miners can steal millions of coins from everyone who spends them, they will. ”Charlie Lee not only helps Bitcoin beat FUD, but has other reasons for implementing SegWit on his project.

“You may be wondering why I support SegWit. Litecoin has no problem with block size. Yes, but SegWit is more than just a block scaling solution. I could even say that block scaling is just a side benefit of SegWit. The main solution is to make trading easier, which enables Lightning Networks (LN) is based on Litecoin. ”

The birth of the Litecoin Foundation

During the development of SegWit, Warren Togami left his position as lead developer. Shaolin Fry joined the team “to help us activate SegWit on Litecoin”. Loshan and Thrasher also came in to help with the code.

At the same time they founded the Litecoin Foundation with Xinxi Wang, Franklyn Richards and Charlie Lee as directors.

The clash between Charlie Lee and Jihan Wu

This is where the story of Litecoin and SegWit entered the legendary “Block Size War”. At the time, mining was a relatively centralized business and Bitmain was a major player. You have created the “most efficient ASIC” and the miners are encouraged to vote with them or others.

“Bitmain co-founder Jihan Wu is a passionate advocate of Bitcoin on-chain scaling,” said Lee. called. That means he rejects SegWit and Lightning Network as scaling solutions. Jihan Wu only insisted on forking Bitcoin to increase the block size, a view that the community ultimately rejected. At that time, however, Wu “single-handedly” prevented the introduction of SegWit in Bitcoin. And he also has a huge impact on Litecoin.

“Unfortunately there has been a lot of controversy. Because Jihan has so much influence, he blocked the activation of SegWit on Bitcoin. And because Bitmain is one of the most efficient Litecoin miners, Jihan also has a great influence on LTC miners. ”

How did Charlie Lee and his team overcome this huge obstacle?

“The difference between Bitcoin and Litecoin is up to me. Bitcoin is more decentralized. Nobody came forward to talk about their vision for Bitcoin. ”

Lee convinced the miners to support SegWit as well and tried to get some of them to vote with him.

“Anyway, I have to do that. I met and spoke to many miners from the end of 2016 to the beginning of 2017. ”

We all know his plan worked, but it was much more difficult than expected. Jihan Wu had enough resources and influence to ignore Lee’s efforts, and he also had the trump card at the time. How did Charlie Lee deal with it? What did he do to make SegWit work on Litecoin and who stood up for him? All of this will be covered in the next and final part of Litecoin’s 10 year history.

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Minh Anh

According to Newsbtc

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