There has been talks that the Litecoin Community is considering implementing segregated witness. Segregated Witness allows the lightning network to run and is one of the best proposed fixes for scaling issues.
While the Bitcoin community is very divided and is struggling to come to a 95% consensus thus far to implement segregated witness, there is only a 75% consensus required in the Litecoin community.
Litecoin was created as the ‘silver to Bitcoin gold’ and it has so far fulfilled this role well. It has a secure network and it uses a different hashing algorithm. One thing seems certain at this point and that is unless the Bitcoin community come to some consensus for a solution which solves the scaling issue of which Segregated Witness appears to be the best solution, the Bitcoin chain will end up stalling as adoption increases but transactions cannot get processed without paying extremely high transaction fees.
Segregated Witness was aimed at solving some issues in the Bitcoin Code (such as transaction malleability), increases the block size limit to 2MB (but with an actual 4MB capacity equivalent compared to today, due to changes which make transactions take up less space per block), and also allows solutions such as the lightning network to be easily implemented.
Segregated Witness is also a soft fork, meaning that older clients will still be able to work, and this is a good thing and is better than many proposed hard fork solutions.
Many conspiracy theories have come up regarding segregated witness, but a one off block size increase hard fork will only require a fork again and will increase the blockchain bloat, but will also render older clients incompatible.
Litecoin will prove to be a good test ground for Segregated Witness, which seems to be the best solution to the scaling problem that has hit Bitcoin. This has not yet been seen in any altcoins due to much lower trading values.
It will be interesting to see what unfolds, Litecoin has a potential to be a testing ground for Segregated Witness and may also see the lightning network be used with it long before Bitcoin.
The community needs to put differences aside and come to a consensus, for if the division of the community remains as it is, so will the 1MB block size limit meaning widespread adoption of Bitcoin as a more mainstream currency will not be possible.