Ill start off by declaring I never imagined myself endorsing what is basically a bitcoin copy cat, with a few superficial differentiators to bitcoin. Until I encountered the last last turn in the bitcoin scaling saga.
Segregated witness by most expert accounts is an amazing piece of software. Allowing the creation of side-chains and a proper lightening network by fixing a bug affecting transaction ID’s. As a nice little extra, it also bumps the on-chain transaction capacity to what is essentially a 2mb block.
Fortunately and unfortunately, miners seem extremely averse to perform any major changes to the protocol. With Segwit stuck at around 25% of the required 95% hashing power and 14 activation periods left (Each period is 2,016 blocks) its beginning to look like we wont get segwit any time soon.
Thus the crises might allow crypto silver to shine. Charlie Lee the creator of litecoin has been pushing hard to get segwit to activate in the much less valuable litecoin network(188M), that will function as a great test before activating on the bitcoin network. Although the hashing stands at 20% over the required 75%. Charlie Lee is adamant that it will activate even if a POW change is required.
The following events lead me to believe there a three outcomes possible.
- Nothing happens, segwit does not activate. Litecoin follows its usual path. In the past two years it has gone from 1.85- 3.76 and YTD 3.12–3.76
2. Segwit activates there is an unknown bug the whole system collapses and litecoin forks back to pre segwit but the price probably craters. Crisis averted in bitcoin land
3. Segwit activates. It immediately goes to the top of R/BTC and huge amounts of press fall upon the first coin with segregated witness. Soon followed by the implementation lightning networks and side-chains that will allow almost free transfer of coins and cross chain transactions.
In scenario 3 we will would see rise in price due to the free publicity and innovation. If bitcoin where to not activate segwit we would see even more money flowing into LTC, since it is the most similar coin with one of the longest track records in the community and bitcoin fees will make it undesirable for many use cases.
TLDR: When segwit activates on litecoin we will see lots of innovation and publicity, that might lead to a price hike.
Edit: So it seems there is VERY strong possibility that segwit will activate soon. F2 pool controls about 43% of the hasing power, and just confirmed that they will run segwit. That puts its at 63%. When you add the variance of blocks the 75% is an even lower real number. We are about to 🚀🚀🚀
Twitter: @mcrsqr
