roadmap-2016.html

<h3>Litecoin Core Roadmap 2016</h3>
<p>Litecoin Core v0.13.x will be a major release featuring many protocol level improvements, code optimizations, the ability to roll out several soft forks at once and the greatly anticipated segregated witness innovation. Some of the most notable features include:</p>

<ul>
<li><em>Faster signature validation</em> using the libsecp256k library developed by Bitcoin Core developers.</li>
<li><em>Wallet pruning</em> to reduce block size storage.</li>
<li><em>Memory usage improvements</em> including better mempool filtering of transactions.</li>
<li><em>Inbuilt Tor control socket</em> API support if Tor is running and also stream isolation for Tor communication.</li>
<li>Functionality to <em>reduce upload traffic</em>.</li>
<li><em>Segregated Witness</em> to allow for greater transaction output and mitigation of transaction malleability.</li>
<li><em>ZMQ support</em> - ZeroMQ is a high performance asynchronous messaging library, aimed at use in distributed concurrent connections. Litecoin will support ZMQ for broadcasting block and transaction data.</li>
<li><em>Hierarchical Deterministic wallets</em> - Litecoin Core will support hierarchical deterministic wallets also known as HD wallets.</li>
<li><em>Obfuscated blockchain data</em> Several antivirus applications detect the Litecoin stored blockchain data as a malware threat. Litecoin 0.13 will obfuscate the blockchain data to rid these false positives. </li>
</ul>

<p>This update will also see the Inclusion of several BIPs to prepare Litecoin for upcoming innovations to do with the Lightning Network and create/use more complex smart contracts, these include:</p>

<ul>
<li>
<a href="https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0009.mediawiki">BIP9</a> - This BIP allows multiple soft fork changes to be deployed in parallel.</li>
<li>
<a href="https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0032.mediawiki">BIP32</a> - This BIP allows Litecoin Core to support hierarchical deterministic wallets.</li>
<li>
<a href="https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0068.mediawiki">BIP68</a> - This BIP allows relative locktime enforcement through sequence numbers.</li>
<li>
<a href="https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0111.mediawiki">BIP111</a> - This BIP extends BIP 37, Connection Bloom filtering, by defining a service bit to allow peers to advertise that they support bloom filters explicitly. It also bumps the protocol version to allow peers to identify old nodes which allow bloom filtering of the connection despite lacking the new service bit.</li>
<li>
<a href="https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0112.mediawiki">BIP112</a> - This BIP is a proposal to redefine the semantics used in determining a time-locked transaction's eligibility for inclusion in a block. The median of the last 11 blocks is used instead of the block's timestamp, ensuring that it increases monotonically with each block. </li>
<li>
<a href="https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0113.mediawiki">BIP113</a> - This BIP describes a new opcode (CHECKSEQUENCEVERIFY) for the Litecoin scripting system that in combination with BIP 68 allows execution pathways of a script to be restricted based on the age of the output being spent. </li>
<li>
<a href="https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0130.mediawiki">BIP130</a> - This BIP adds a new message, "sendheaders", which indicates that a node prefers to receive new block announcements via a "headers" message rather than an "inv". </li>
<li>
<a href="https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0133.mediawiki">BIP133</a> - This BIP adds a new message “feefilter”, which serves to instruct peers not to send “inv”s to the node for transactions with fees below the specified fee rate.</li>
<li>
<a href="https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0141.mediawiki">BIP141</a> - This BIP defines a new structure called a “witness” that is committed to blocks separated from the transaction merkle tree.</li>
<li>
<a href="https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0143.mediawiki">BIP143</a> - This BIP contains the logic for signature verification for version 0 witness program.</li>
<li>
<a href="https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0144.mediawiki">BIP144</a> - This BIP contains the logic for new messages and serialization formats for propagation of transactions and blocks committing to segregated witness structures.</li>
<li>
<a href="https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0152.mediawiki">BIP152</a> - This BIP add compact block relay to reduce the bandwidth required to propagate new blocks.</li>
</ul>

<p>The Litecoin Core developers aim to have this version released by September/October.</p>

<p>Litecoin shares the same P2SH address format as Bitcoin (addresses beginning with a 3). This has caused some confusion for Litecoin users. We will look into introducing a unique P2SH address prefix.</p>

<p>In the longer term, we will do extensive research and development into flexcap blocksize limit.</p>