Tag: F2Pool

Charlie Lee Sums Up Litecoin’s 10 Years History. Part Four: SegWit Activation

by NEWSBTC

Today is the day, Litecoin’s 10th anniversary. Congratulations to Charlie Lee and everyone involved in the project over the years. We are exploring Litecoin’s history through the eyes of its creator. We covered its fair launch, the long-hard road to exchanges adopting LTC, and we introduced the SegWit story. It’s time to finish it. 

The last time, we introduced Bitmain’s co-founder Jihan Wu. Reportedly, he was singlehandedly stopping SegWit adoption in the Bitcoin blockchain. Lee’s plan was to use Litecoin as a Testnet of sorts for SegWit. “I realized that here’s a chance for Litecoin to do something to help Bitcoin. If we can get SegWit on Litecoin, it can clear out all the FUD and prove that SegWit is safe and a good upgrade for Bitcoin.” To accomplish that, he had to convince miners to side with him and not with the manufacturer of the most efficient ASICs.

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According to Coindesk, there was another important incentive for Litecoin to adopt SegWit:

“Since SegWit could potentially pave the way for technologies that expand the value proposition of cryptocurrencies, the move toward accepting the upgrade has reignited excitement around the normally less-popular cryptocurrency. Litecoin’s price has nearly tripled since the end of March as a result.”

And this is where today’s story starts.

LTCUSD price chart for 10/13/2021 - TradingView

LTCUSD price chart for 10/13/2021 - TradingView


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LTC price chart for 10/13/2021 on FX | Source: LTC/USD on TradingView.com

Charlie Lee Talks To Litecoin‘s Miners

During the end of 2016 and the beginning of 2012, Lee talked to everyone. One of his first victories was to get “Innosilicon, another LTC ASIC maker,” to his side. In this part of the story, we can see how hard Jihan Wu was playing. A “huge LTC Miner” was ready to signal for SegWit in principle, but, since his machines were in a farm controlled by Jihan Wu, he was afraid that he might lose access to cheap electricity.

The objective was to get “75% of blocks signal for SegWit within a 2-week timeframe.” Easier said than done. LitecoinPool was the first great pool to side with SegWit. Another big mining pool, F2pool, also promised to do it, but they didn’t right away. This turned out to be great for the cause because they provided a clear signal that the market supported the SegWit transition. Lee narrates, “over the next month, F2pool actually flipped flopped. They would signal and then stop signaling. The market reacted accordingly. When F2pool started signaling, the price will go up, and vice versa.” 

To complicate things, “Jihan wanted me to personally visit him and the miners in China to convince them about SegWit.” Lee didn’t like the power-play, but that was nothing. As more and more miners signaled for SegWit, Jihan turned to the ace up his sleeve. There was a rumor that “Bitmain was building a ton of LTC miners and was going to turn them all on themselves to block the upgrade.”

It was time for Charlie Lee to call in the big guns.

The User Activated Soft Fork

Since both the miners and the market were clearly signaling in support of SegWit, Charlie Lee felt he had the right “to pull the UASF trump card out.” One of the wonders of decentralized organizations is that the users can also activate a soft fork. “If the majority of users and exchanges run the UASF code, SegWit will activate.” If that happened, miners had to comply and adopt SegWit as well.

The threat of a UASF was too much to bear, so the miners agreed to meet with Charlie Lee online and work things out. 

And the rest is history, “On April 21, I met with Jihan, Innosilicon, and miners for over 8 hours IIRC. It was exhausting.“ They reached an agreement, this is the blog post announcing it. Among other things, it says:

“We agree that protocol upgrade should be made under community consensus, and should not be unilateral action of developers nor miners. We advocate that Litecoin protocol upgrade decision should be made based on the needs of the users, through the roundtable meeting voting process, and activated by miner voting.”

Charlie Lee reflects, “Although this seems so bad for a decentralized cryptocurrency to have a closed door meeting to make decisions that affect the future of Litecoin, I felt like it was a compromise I’m willing to take. It’s better than an all out war between the miners and I.”

On May 10th, 2017, SegWit was activated on Litecoin.

After that, a few historic transactions took place

“A lot of people have been saying that segwit is unsafe because segwit coins are “anyone-can-spend” and can be stolen. So lets put this to the test. I put up $1MM of LTC into a segwit address. You can see it’s a segwit address because I sent and spent 1 LTC first to reveal the redeemscript.”

  • A few months later, Bitcoin activated SegWit through a UASF. “It’s hard to know exactly how much Litecoin helped with this. I feel like it definitely has helped.”

  • Days later, Charlie Lee and Strike’s Jack Mallers starred in the first Lightning Network request/ payment transaction on Litecoin. That man Jack Mallers has a way to get involved in historic transactions, like this one, and this one.

  • That same month, Lee did his first Atomic Swap transaction. “This shows how one can move coins between different chains in a decentralized way. It was a great proof of concept and paved the way for decentralized exchanges.”

  • And later, he did another Atomic Swap but this time with Bitcoin.

  • And the next month, Lee did “the first ever cross-chain swap between BTC and LTC via Lightning.” This time it was with the now world-famous Lightning Labs.

Related Reading | Binance Burns Record $600 Million BNB In Its 15th Quarter

Wasn’t that an amazing, amazing story? We learned so much. And, even though we said this was the last chapter in the Litecoin 10-year history, Charlie Lee has another story to tell. Join us tomorrow for the infamous story of Charlie selling all of his Litecoin. Another legendary moment in crypto land.

Featured Image: Charlie Lee's picture from this tweet | Charts by TradingView

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F2Pool Encodes Money-Printing Headline Into First Post-Coinbase Listing Block

by Bitcoin Magazine

Bitcoin mining pool F2Pool memorialized Coinbase’s first day of public trading with a nod to Bitcoin’s Genesis Block, encoding the text “NYTimes 10/Mar/21 House Gives Final Approval to Biden’s $1.9T Pandemic Relief Bill” into the first Bitcoin block it mined yesterday.

The message was taken from a New York Times headline reporting a recent stimulus package that would necessitate rampant money printing. It echoes the message that Bitcoin’s pseudonymous creator Satoshi Nakamoto encoded into the coinbase data of Bitcoin’s first-ever (or “genesis”) block, which read “The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks” in reference to a similar headline.

Coinbase announced that it had asked F2Pool to embed the message as a tribute to Bitcoin history. It was encoded at block height 679,187 and is now an immutable part of the Bitcoin blockchain.

“On 03/Jan/2009, Satoshi coded a message into the Bitcoin Genesis Block,” Coinbase tweeted. “As a nod to Satoshi in our listing today, we asked F2Pool to embed a message in the Bitcoin blockchain.”

As one of the earliest portals for buying bitcoin, Coinbase has been instrumental in BTC adoption. Its public listing, which saw it reach a valuation around $85 billion, is a significant marker of Bitcoin’s growth since its Genesis Block. The fact that a recent headline so closely resembling the one that Satoshi chose could be embedded into the blockchain to mark this occasion is a sign that the world needs Bitcoin now as much as ever.

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Ethereum’s EIP 1559 Fee Market Scheduled to Launch in July

by Btcmanager

An All Core Developers call today confirmed that the Ethereum Improvement Proposal (EIP) 1559 would be packaged with the London hard fork this coming July regardless of the mining industry’s discontent with the proposal.

Developments Are Underway

The event will mark one of the significant milestones ever made on the Ethereum blockchain.

From the information given, about five other EIPs are likely to join EIP 1559 in London.

EIP 1559 Is a Big Deal

High Ethereum gas fees have been a great inconvenience in the Ethereum blockchain for a while now. In a few months, this might not be an issue anymore. Ethereum Improvement Proposal (EIP)-1559 will provide a solution for ETH high gas fees by improving how transactions operate on Ethereum and modifying the network’s current monetary policy’s underlying economics.


A significant feature of this new fee structure is that the inclusion fee is paid only to ETH miners. The mining will still burn essential costs under this plan. It ensures that it is only possible to use Ether-Tokens for transactions on the Ethereum network. In turn, it supports the economic value of ETH tokens within the Ethereum ecosystem and the risks associated with reducing risks involved with miner extractable value (MEV).

This burn is also designed to balance inflation on the Ethereum network, thus granting ETH miners block prizes and inclusion fees. Ensuring that the miner does not pay the base fee on an Ethereum block is vital because the mining incentive to exploit the TX fee is essentially removed to collect even more charges from network users.

Given the current difficulties of choosing the correct transaction fee, the proposal has been well received by Ethereum’s developers and consumers. On the other side, the miners and the mining pools have gathered against the initiative as it advanced to mainnet.

Campaigns Voting Out EIP

Indeed, Ethereum mining has been an incredibly lucrative business as of late. The total mining revenue surpassed a record $1.3 billion in February, with some 50% coming from fees alone, according to CoinMetrics. An increase in both the price of ether and transaction fees has introduced a wave of new hash power to the network, which is more than double that of a year ago.

Flexpool, a minority mining pool, started a publicity campaign against the EIP. There then joined several minority pools, followed by Ethermine and SparkPool. More than 60% of the hash power of the Ethereum network is now contrary to the proposal. Having about 10% hash capacity, F2Pool is the largest pool in favor of EIP.

On the call, developers from Ethereum chose to pair EIP 1559 with a difficulty blast delay. Also known as the “Ice Age,” the bomb raises the Ethereum network mining difficulty incrementally. Péter Szilágyi, the leading team at Geths, said that pairing EIP 1559 with the delay made it impossible to forge Ethereum without any technological barriers at that time.


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Digital Currency Group’s crypto mining arm enters top-10 global mining pools

by Cointelegraph

Foundry, a wholly-owned cryptocurrency mining subsidiary of Digital Currency Group, or DCG, has entered the top-10 largest Bitcoin (BTC) mining pools in the world.

The firm’s CEO Barry Silbert announced the news on Jan. 26, predicting that Foundry will soon break into the top-five mining pools list.

At publishing time, Foundry has a total hash rate of 2.74 exahashes per second (EH/s), according to data from block explorer Btc.com. The mining pool is responsible for 1.85% of the total global hash rate.

Source: Btc.com

The news comes shortly after Silbert announced that global Bitcoin miners will be able to join the Foundry pool starting in February 2021. The CEO also expressed optimism about the United States’ mining power, predicting that Foundry will “soon become the largest U.S.-based bitcoin mining pool.”

Officially introduced by DCG in August 2020, Foundry is still far from the world’s top mining pools like F2Pool and Binance Pool in terms of hash rate. China-based F2Pool — the largest mining pool comprising 18% of the total hash rate — is generating a hash rate of more than 24 EH/s at publishing time.

Launched by Binance in April 2020, Binance Pool is now the second-largest mining pool, responsible for nearly 13% of total global Bitcoin mining power. The pool’s hash rate amounts to 19.16 EH/s at publishing time.

As Cointelegraph reported on Jan. 22, F2Pool’s activity was likely a major reason behind Bitcoin’s recent sell-off, resulting in its price dipping below $29,000.