Litecoin saw a fall in price by around 10% today as segregated witnesses (segwit) hardware share dropped to 63% from nearly 70%. The reason for its drop is not quite clear, but it follows a statement by Wang Chun, F2pool’s co-founder – the biggest litecoin pool – that he was reconsidering segwit signaling.
Speculation increased today that Bitmain/Antpool, another big litecoin pool, was to add new hardware to stop the activation of segwit. No evidence was provided to back the rumor, but Jihan Wu, Antpool’s co-founder, is against segwit’s activation in bitcoin if the Hong Kong agreement is not followed.
Moreover, LTC1BTC’s founder has come out strongly against segwit, saying some weeks back that there was no way it was going to activate in litecoin. Uncertainty in the small litecoin community, therefore, has increased, as reflected by the price fall over recent days.
Some are now calling for a flag-day soft fork (otherwise known as UASF) segwit activation, but if seriously proposed this is likely to increase uncertainty even further as such activation mechanism has the potential to split the currency into two or three chains, causing complete chaos.
The latest developments are probably a spill-over from bitcoin’s never ending blocksize debate. A significant number of bitcoiners oppose segwit in its current state, while those who support it are now propping up litecoin.
Segwit advocates, for example, have been seen contributing to litecoin public discussions in what appears to be a marketing push in the hope that litecoin’s segwit activation would increase pressure for its activation on bitcoin.
However, bitcoin’s segwit has long stalled at around 25% with the proposal not seeing much change for now months. As such, many would conclude it has been rejected in its current form, but some continue to strongly push for it, while shooting down any proposal that may end the stalemate.
