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Litecoin activated SegWit about one month ago on May 10th (block 1201536). What impact did the SegWit activation on Litecoin have? How many blocks have a witness commitment? How many SegWit transactions are there?

(I assume that there was no impact on fees or capacity, but if there was that would be interesting as well.)

Murch
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    The entire point of SegWit is to reduce the amount of data required to record a transaction in the blockchain which increases capacity and reduces fees payable. There will be an impact on these things going forward as SegWit adoption increases, we are in the early days still. – Peter Bushnell Aug 03 '17 at 10:35
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    SegWit doesn't reduce the amount of data required to record a transaction. Non-native SegWit transactions are bigger than legacy transactions, they simply have less weight under the consensus rules of SegWit. – Murch Aug 03 '17 at 15:46
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    As I understood it the signatures in SegWit are not recorded thus reducing the total size of the transaction. It was noted that signatures can be approximately 60% of the transaction size, so cut these out and record a "witness" of the transaction. – Peter Bushnell Aug 03 '17 at 16:12
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    That's not entirely accurate. The signatures are part of the transaction, the block and the blockchain. All archival nodes will keep them just as they keep the complete blockchain today. The new transaction structure merely allows for more efficient pruning, as the witness data can be independently discarded after checking it by lite clients and pruning nodes which don't keep the full blockchain. – Murch Aug 03 '17 at 16:54
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    Related link so I remember when I get to this: https://www.reddit.com/r/litecoin/comments/6m33yz/is_there_a_blockexplorer_or_other_site_that/dnqyo9g/ – Murch Oct 20 '17 at 08:42

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Litecoin was not facing the same transaction volume pressure as Bitcoin (due to 4x faster confirmation times and lower relative volumes), so while the segwit lockin did raise the effective block size to 3.3~ MB, this didn't have much practical impact since the blocks weren't hitting that ceiling yet.

However, it did enable a lot of lightning network projects to start running on a realnet, and put a lot of concerns about the reliability of segwit to bed.

Luke Mlsna
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    Please elaborate on "lightning network projects".... – Pacerier Oct 26 '17 at 02:18
  • Sure. LND (https://github.com/lightningnetwork/lnd) is the one I'm most familiar with and what I based that comment on, as it was first put to use on the Litecoin blockchain. There are other implementations that also benefited: ZAP (https://github.com/LN-Zap/zap-desktop), the MIT's LIT (https://github.com/mit-dci/lit), Elements (https://github.com/ElementsProject/lightning), and the work on integration with tor (https://github.com/lightningnetwork/lightning-onion) to name the most popular. – Luke Mlsna Oct 27 '17 at 14:38
  • Your use of quotes and elipses suggests you do not believe the Lightning Network exists, is that your real question? – Luke Mlsna Oct 27 '17 at 17:26