The window for Litecoin miners to start signaling for MWEB starts today. This is Litecoin's biggest upgrade of all time (litecoin has been running flawlessly since created in 2011).
How does the miner signaling work? Well approximately every 2-weeks (8,064 blocks to be exact) a signaling window is opened to allow for litecoin miners to vote for the upgrade.
During this time if 75% of the mined blocks have a signal for the upgrade then the litecoin upgrade will take place. If less than 75% of miners signal, then the next window will open and the miners can vote again. This will go on until either 75% vote during one of the windows or until 1 year from the first signaling window. The progress can be tracked here at the litecoin signal dashboard.
If after 1 year, the litecoin upgrade will automatically upgrade.
Therefore, with high certainty the litecoin upgrade will take place between now and February of 2023.
This new upgrade has been several years in the making, and will finally add the last missing characteristic of great money which is "fungibility" to litecoin. It also adds confidential transactions, where the amounts transacted between parties are not recorded on the public blockchain. This is good, because the receiver doesn't know how much money the sender has in their wallet or anyone else on the internet.
Today the amount of litecoin in your wallet is visible to anyone on the internet, it's like everyone knowing how much is in your bank account. Having this information open to the public is bad for an individual's privacy and security. The same can be said for companies, sovereign wealth funds, and governments, etc. It is a privacy and security issue if the amounts kept in wallets are easily known to everyone and anyone.
After the upgrade the litecoin transactions which opt-in to the feature would not be recorded on the public blockchain. This new feature will be optional and would be available when making transactions, it's like Venmo's feature to turn on public transactions where everyone on the internet can see your amounts or using the privacy feature where this information isn't open to everyone on the internet.
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