About Litecoin

Litecoin
Official Litecoin logo
Denominations
Subunit
0.001	lites
0.00000001	photons
Plural	Litecoin, LTCs
Symbol	LTC, Ł
Demographics
Date of introduction	7 October 2011; 6 years ago
User(s)	International
Valuation
Inflation	Limited release (geometric series, rate halves every 4 years reaching a final total of 84 million LTC)

Litecoin (LTC or Ł) is a peer-to-peer cryptocurrency and open source software project released under the MIT/X11 license. Creation and transfer of coins is based on an open sourcecryptographic protocol and is not managed by any central authority. The coin was inspired by, and in technical details is nearly identical to, Bitcoin (BTC).

History

Litecoin was released via an open-source client on GitHub on October 7, 2011 by Charlie Lee, a former Google employee. The Litecoin network went live on October 13, 2011. It was a fork of the Bitcoin Core client, differing primarily by having a decreased block generation time (2.5 minutes), increased maximum number of coins, different hashing algorithm (scrypt, instead of SHA-256), and a slightly modified GUI.

During the month of November 2013, the aggregate value of Litecoin experienced massive growth which included a 100% leap within 24 hours.

Litecoin reached a $1 billion market capitalization in November 2013. By late November 2017, its market capitalization was US$4,600,081,733 ($85.18 per coin). By mid-December of 2017, the coin's marketcap had reachedUS$20,000,000,000 and each litecoin was valued at approximately US$371.00.

In May 2017, Litecoin became the first of the top-5 (by market cap) cryptocurrencies to adopt Segregated Witness. Later in May of the same year, the first Lightning Network transaction was completed through Litecoin, transferring 0.00000001 LTC from Zürich to San Francisco in under one second.

Differences from Bitcoin

Litecoin is different in some ways from Bitcoin.

• The Litecoin Network aims to process a block every 2.5 minutes, rather than Bitcoin's 10 minutes. The developers claim that this allows Litecoin to have faster transaction confirmation.
• Litecoin uses scrypt in its proof-of-work algorithm, a sequential memory-hard function requiring asymptotically more memory than an algorithm which is not memory-hard.

Due to Litecoin's use of the scrypt algorithm, FPGA and ASIC devices made for mining Litecoin are more complicated to create and more expensive to produce than they are for Bitcoin, which uses SHA-256.

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