Segregated Witness encounters another obstacle, what is the reason for the surge in Litecoin computing power?

The implementation of Litecoin Segregated Witness can be described as one wave after another.

According to community users, from the evening of April 17 to the morning of April 18, the computing power of Litecoin increased by more than 600G. Among them, the computing power of LTC1BTC mining pool increased from less than 300G to more than 700G, and the computing power of LTC.TOP mining pool increased from about 150G to nearly 500G. As the computing power of the two mining pools increased, the real-time support rate of Litecoin Segregated Witness displayed by the entire network dropped from about 80% to below 70%.

(The above pictures are screenshots of the mining pool computing power at 8:26 pm on April 17 and 9:22 am on April 18. The picture provider Maya confirmed that the screenshots are authentic and not photoshopped based on the time and the background color of the coin price in the picture.)

People familiar with the matter speculate that the surge in computing power is a premeditated attempt to obstruct the implementation of Litecoin's SegWit, which is recognized by the community.

It is understood that the person in charge of Litecoin mining pools LTC1BTC and LTC.TOP is Jiang Zhuoer, who opposes the Segregated Witness scheme. In the latest block marking of whether to support Litecoin Segregated Witness, the blocks of LTC1BTC and LTC.TOP, whose computing power has increased suddenly, are not marked with SW, which directly caused the Litecoin Segregated Witness support rate to drop below the 75% activation threshold.

According to statistics, based on the latest 500 block marks, except for LTC1BTC, LTC.TOP and Antpool, other mining pools have supported Litecoin Segregated Witness.

Where does the increase in computing power come from?

So where did the hundreds of gigabytes of computing power that increased overnight come from? According to the analysis and inference of users on the "Bitcoin Miner" Weibo and the Babbitt Forum, the computing power was not produced out of thin air, but came from the Litecoin L3+ mining machines that Bitmain had not shipped.

On April 18, the same day as the computing power increase, Bitmain released an announcement about the delayed delivery of Litecoin mining machine L3+. The announcement stated that "due to firmware issues, the L3+ originally scheduled to be shipped on April 15-20 has been delayed, and the specific delivery time is to be determined", and gave two processing options: refund and waiting for delivery.

The explanation of "firmware problem" made many users suspect that the real reason why the original mining machine was not delivered on time was that Bitmain used the computing power of the mining machines purchased by users to prevent the implementation of Litecoin Segregated Witness.

Such doubts are not groundless.

As early as April 13, a user of the Babbitt forum revealed that Bitmain had 1,000 Litecoin mining machines L3+ in stock at the mine, but had not yet been turned on. "Bitcoin Miner" said on his Weibo that according to reasonable inference and logic, "according to the supply chain, various manufacturers, and the feedback from miners. The mining machines are from Bitmain. This batch of products has already been produced and deployed at the mine. There are goods but they are not delivered, and they are turned on by themselves."

At the same time, according to information provided by the Babbitt forum user "wangshun", the official data of Antpool showed that the LTC computing power increased from more than 100G to more than 400G at around 16:00 on the 17th, and then dropped to less than 200G. Subsequently, the computing power of LTC1BTC and LTC.TOP increased significantly. Based on the timing, the degree of coincidence between motivation and computing power, many community users have made the above-mentioned speculation of "borrowing user computing power to prevent the implementation of Litecoin Segregated Witness".

All the doubts seem to point to Bitmain, which owns the mining machines and computing power. The reporter asked relevant people for information, and Bitmain said that the official response should be taken as the standard. Jiang Zhuoer, the head of LTC1BTC and LTC.TOP mining pools, responded that they are preparing a statement and said that "the outside world basically does not know what happened at present."

Will Litecoin's hash rate double?

On the 19th, a user asked Wang Chun, the head of the fish pool, on Twitter if there was any explanation for this matter. Wang Chun replied, "This is just a small increase in computing power. In the next few weeks, you will see more. Wu is making a big move."

Later, another tweet by Wang Chun seemed to foreshadow the big move: Bitmain has prepared a chip with twice the computing power of the current Litecoin network.

Once the machine mentioned by Wang Chun, which is equipped with a chip with twice the computing power of the entire network, is officially operational, can Litecoin Segregated Witness still be implemented smoothly? What do you think?