Litecoin
| Litecoin | |
|---|---|
 Official Litecoin logo | |
| Denominations | |
| Plural | Litecoins |
| Symbol | Ł |
| Ticker symbol | LTC |
| Precision | 10−8 |
| Subunits | |
| 1⁄1000 | millilitecoin, mŁ |
| 1⁄1000000 | microlitecoins, photons, μŁ |
| Development | |
| Original author(s) | Charlie Lee |
| Initial release | 0.1.0 / 7 October 2011 |
| Latest release | 0.18.1[1] / 11 June 2020 |
| Code repository | github |
| Development status | Active |
| Project fork of | Bitcoin |
| Written in | C++ |
| Operating system | Windows, OS X, Linux, Android |
| Developer(s) | Litecoin Core Development Team |
| Source model | Open source |
| License | MIT License |
| Website | [1] litecoin.org litecoin.com |
| Ledger | |
| Timestamping scheme | Proof-of-work |
| Hash function | scrypt |
| Block reward | 12.5 LTC (approximately till August 2023), halved approximately every four years |
| Block time | 2.5 minutes |
| Block explorer | ltc.bitaps.com explorer.litecoin.net chainz.cryptoid.info blockchair.com |
| Circulating supply | 62,424,175 LTC (26 June 2019) |
| Supply limit | 84,000,000 LTC |
Litecoin (LTC or Ł) is a peer-to-peer cryptocurrency and open-source software project released under the MIT/X11 license. Litecoin was an early bitcoin spinoff or altcoin, starting in October 2011.[2] In technical details, Litecoin is nearly identical to Bitcoin.
History[edit]
Litecoin was released via an open-source client on GitHub on October 7, 2011 by Charlie Lee, a Google employee who later became Engineering Director at Coinbase.[2][3] The Litecoin network went live on October 13, 2011.
It was a source code 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.[4]
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[edit]
Litecoin is different in some ways from Bitcoin.[citation needed]
- The Litecoin Network aims to process a block every 2.5 minutes, rather than Bitcoin's 10 minutes. This allows Litecoin to confirm transactions much faster than Bitcoin.[5]
- 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.[citation needed]
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.[6]
When it comes to Litecoin as a method of payment, in early days there was correlation to Bitcoin in terms of extended payment patterns. Although one might assume that payment patterns of Litecoin would converge to Bitcoin, it has been found that there is little correlation of the payment patterns of Litecoin vs Bitcoin today, and these patterns continue to diverge over time.[7]
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