A reddit user has challenged hackers to test Litecoin's new SegWit technology with a bounty of $1 million dollars!
10 days ago, on may 10, Litecoin activated segregated witness (SegWit) transactions on their network.
Originally, SegWit is a feature that was supposed to be added to Bitcoin - but the bitcoin community couldn't agree on whether they wanted to implement it or not (they still haven't come to a conclusion until this day.)
The Bitcoin network is so overloaded that transactions take too long to confirm - and that's where SegWit comes in as an alternative.
SegWit is a process which reduces the size of blocks on a blockchain, by removing signature data from the transactions.
Therefore, there is additional capacity on the blockchain for more transactions.
SegWit is very controversial - some people believe that this feature makes the network more unsafe, while others are strong supporters.
Since Bitcoin didn't agree on implementing SegWit yet, Litecoin agreed to use the new technology instead - making its value skyrocket from around $4 to just below $30.
Apart from the functions explained above, SegWit also offers the opportunity for lightning transactions - transactions that are fulfilled nearly in real time, without having to wait for confirmations.
So now, since so many people are arguing that SegWit is unsafe, a reddit user has challenged the critics to try to hack one of the transactions.
But not just any transaction - he put an unbelievable bounty of $1 Million on the line.
This is what the reddit user posted:
“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. Let’s see if segwit really is ‘anyone-can-spend’ or not. Good luck.”
The main accusation is that “anyone can spend” coins on a SegWit network.
In a regular cryptocurrency network, a block consists of data from the sender and receiver, as well as a witness (= signature).
But in Segwit, witness data is counted seperately from the transaction itself.
The witness data is only counted for one quarter of its current size - increasing the number of transactions within a block.
Until now, 10 days after the bounty hunt began, no one managed to hack the SegWit transaction yet.
Although countless critics were always bashing the technology for its lack of security, no one was actually able to prove their theory yet.
What do you think - is SegWit a feature with positive or negative consequences? Is the network hackeable? And shout Bitcoin implement it or not?
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