By
Steve Muchoki
April 23rd, 2024
Litecoin’s huge support is seen as a culmination of several weeks of investor excitement.
Litecoin has grabbed the headlines as the cryptocurrency beat off yesterday’s falls and rose to the new all-time high of over $35. Now, the cryptocurrency is traded at $30 level as of the moment of writing.
Litecoin community has been waiting for the activation of Segregated Witness on the network for weeks and finally the moment has come. Litecoin’s huge support is seen as a culmination of several weeks of investor excitement.
Some people doubt if this “pump” should have taken place because it was known that SegWit was to be activated within a specific timeframe. After all, the mining pools got together to pledge SegWit support, effectively locking in the activation threshold.
Litecoin is not the first altcoin to implement SegWit on the network. Last month, SysCoin was the first to activate SegWit while this week Vertcoin followed. Both coins experienced considerable price spikes. Nevertheless, Litecoin is the first major currency to do so. It means that it has a competitive edge over Bitcoin. Litecoin never had full network blocks to deal with.
Litecoin creator Charlie Lee announced the activation of SegWit in Twitter.
SegWit has activated on Litecoin! 💥😁 pic.twitter.com/lpeklpQpZe
— Charlie Lee Ⓜ️🕸️ (@SatoshiLite) May 10, 2017
Lee underlined that although SegWit unlocking meant “so much goodness,” there is still the lion’s share of the work remaining.
Yup, you got it right on! So much goodness that SegWit unlocks. Though you need to be patient as there is still a lot of work to be done. https://t.co/qY5gs0h9Aa
— Charlie Lee Ⓜ️🕸️ (@SatoshiLite) May 10, 2017
It is a common practice in the cryptocurrency world that a value increase is often met with profit-taking, once things start to get rolling. So no wonder that Litecoin has sweepingly surged to 0.022 BTC. Experts mark that the price point wasn’t expected to be sustainable, and the following sell-off pushed the price back down to the 0.021 mark. Time will show if a further reversal of the price gains occurs, although markets are seemingly stabilizing a bit.
In general, the activation of SegWit is so much more than just increasing of the block size limit. This problem is more than important for Bitcoin. Traditionally, Bitcoin transactions are gathered into “blocks” which is turned into a complex math solution. Miners process these solutions via high-powered computers to determine if the transaction is possible. Once other miners confirm that the puzzle is correct, the transactions are approved and the miners get reward in bitcoin.
The problem is that the rules of bitcoin only allow a certain amount of transactions through in one block. In March, Bitcoin community faced a possibility of so-called “hard fork”, which could result in blockchain splitting into two parts and therefore the creation of two separate cryptocurrencies.
The example of litecoin proved that there is one more possible scenatio, “soft fork”, that will increase the block size for bitcoin without major disruption.
Bitcoin price has been growing for the past weeks. Yesterday, the price reached its high of $1,833. Just for the last month, Bitcoin has risen more than 33 percent for the last month. The implementation of SegWit could send the value up even further.