The Bitcoin community has been in a heated debate for years over how to scale the network to handle more transactions in a block.The main debate is around security vs increased transaction capacity.Right now each bitcoin block can handle 1mb worth of transactions and some people want this capacity increased through a hard fork.Bitcoin’s main developers think that a hard fork can cause security issues around a network split and would prefer to implement a scaling solution through a soft fork.Both types of forks would change rules to the Bitcoin protocol, except a soft fork is backwards compatible with nodes that don’t upgrade whereas a hard fork isn’t.Bitcoin’s core developers have come up with a soft fork solution called Segregated Witness, which will increase block capacity to around 1.7mb and fix the transaction malleability issue.This has already been implemented into Bitcoin’s software but requires 95% of the miners to signal and activate it.Due to ongoing political issues with certain factions of miners being against it, activation of Segregated Witness may not happen as quickly as people would like.

As a result scaling the Bitcoin network is coming to a stalemate.In an effort to help things move forward, litecoin developers have decided to implement Segregated Witness into the protocol.bitcoin bot telegramTheir network transactions aren’t close to capacity so technically they don’t need an immediate scaling solution but the effort can increase Bitcoin’s chance of implementing it sooner than later.bitcoin price bitstampLitecoin is very similar to Bitcoin because it comes from the same code with a few minor adaptations such as supply and transaction speed.bitcoin china money launderingThis will serve as a live example for the Bitcoin network to study and can even lead to payment channels such as lightning network.ethereum clock

If everything works smoothly without any serious issues then Bitcoin can safely make the changes without jeopardising a +$14B market.ethereum message transactionThere’s a strong chance that litecoin will make the changes sooner because the miner vote requires only 75% consensus and litecoin’s largest mining pool F2Pool (40% of the hashrate) announced support for the changes.ethereum euro kursThe LTC/BTC markets have been on a long bear trend since the rally of 2015.During that summer rally a Chinese ponzi scheme had accumulated and dumped around 20% of the entire supply.Litecoin used to have strong correlation to bitcoin and would rally alongside it but lost its correlation after the 2015 pump.The dollar value of litecoin has remained stable but it lost grounds against bitcoin’s strong percentage gains.If litecoin implements these changes in 2017 then the fundamentals just might be enough to wake this market up from its slumber.

Looking at the LTC/BTC charts we’re seeing prices at new lows but showing the first sign of breaking out of a large descending trend line.If this market wakes up there are several reasons why it could have a big trend.Listed on all the major exchanges including the Chinese market movers About Latest Posts Latest posts by Rocky (see all) Bitcoin and Cryptocurrencies for Beginners 3 Things You Should Know if You’re New to Bitcoin Cofoundit Aims to Help Blockchain Startups Raise CapitalCoinbase has just rolled out full support for Litecoin, its third cryptocurrency.Users will be able to buy, sell, send and store Litecoin from Coinbase’s website or mobile apps, using easy payment methods like a credit/debit card or PayPal.While Coinbase was founded as a platform to transact only with Bitcoin, the company has since announced its intent to add other cryptocurrencies with the broader goal of becoming a “digital currency company.” Last summer Coinbase added support for Ethereum, which is now the second most-popular digital currency with a market cap about one-third the size of Bitcoin’s market cap.

At the time, the reasoning was that Coinbase saw Ethereum’s focus on smart contracts as a tangible improvement over Bitcoin, and not just another alt-coin that doesn’t serve any real function.Interestingly, Litecoin’s creator, Charlie Lee, has been director of engineering at Coinbase for nearly four years.And while there were always ongoing discussions about adding Litecoin to the platform, they didn’t really materialize until recently.Lee explained that it’s been a slow few years for Litecoin.While the digital currency had a heyday in late 2013 with its price spiking to over $50 per coin and over $1 billion in total market cap, it quickly fell back to earth and basically remained flat for three years.So why the sudden change?If you’re familiar with Bitcoin you know that the community is facing an internal struggle with deciding how to scale the currency for the future.Essentially, Bitcoin’s original code wasn’t designed to process this many transactions on a daily basis, and now the network is charging too much per transaction, which takes too long to confirm.

Luckily there are two main proposed solutions: Bitcoin Unlimited, which aims to get rid of the block size limit altogether, and Segregated Witness (SegWit), which wants to slightly increase the block size while also moving some non-essential data out of the transaction and off the blockchain.Both solutions would require a “fork,” meaning the majority of miners would have to agree on the changes and signal to slightly alter the currency’s blockchain.So far the Bitcoin community has been unable to reach a consensus on how to fix the scaling issue.A few months ago Lee and the Litecoin community decided to work on implementing SegWit into Litecoin.And after heated discussions with the biggest players in the Litecoin mining community, the group reached consensus about a week ago to implement SegWit.Last week, miners “voted” with their hash power to signal for SegWit, and the actual code will be implemented next week.While Litecoin is still small enough that it’s not suffering from the same scaling issues as is Bitcoin, the team thought it’d be a good way to bring something exciting to Litecoin.

Plus, SegWit has some other benefits besides just increasing network capacity.It prevents malleability, which is essentially the risk (that currently exists in Bitcoin) that third parties can alter transactions before they are confirmed by the network.Implementing SegWit will also allow Litecoin to experiment with something called Lightening Networks — which would essentially allow for instant Litecoin payments off the main blockchain, with transactions only settling on the chain when they need to.And perhaps best of all, these recent developments have rekindled interest in the Litecoin currency, sending the price (and more importantly, volume) skyrocketing.This increased trading volume is what finally allowed Coinbase to implement Litecoin, knowing they now have a liquid enough market (on the Coinbase-owned exchange GDAX) to supply user demand.Essentially, Lee sees Litecoin’s long-term goal as being able to help Bitcoin alleviate some transactional volume by taking over smaller, less important transactions.