Litecoin

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 source cryptographic protocol and is not managed by any central authority. Litecoin was an early bitcoin spinoff or altcoin, starting in October 2011.[2] In technical details, litecoin is nearly identical to Bitcoin.

Litecoin
Official Litecoin logo
Denominations
PluralLitecoins
SymbolŁ
Ticker symbolLTC
Precision10−8
Subunits
 ​1⁄1000millilitecoin, mŁ
 ​1⁄1000000microlitecoins, photons, μŁ
Development
Original author(s)Charlie Lee
Initial release0.1.0 / 7 October 2011 (2011-10-07)
Latest release0.17.1[1] / 26 May 2019 (2019-05-26)
Code repositorygithub.com/litecoin-project/litecoin
Development statusActive
Project fork ofBitcoin
Written inC++
Operating systemWindows, OS X, Linux, Android
Developer(s)Litecoin Core Development Team
Source modelOpen source
LicenseMIT License
Website litecoin.org litecoin.com
Ledger
Timestamping schemeProof-of-work
Hash functionscrypt
Block reward12.5 LTC (approximately till August 2023), halved approximately every four years
Block time2.5 minutes
Block explorerltc.bitaps.com explorer.litecoin.net chainz.cryptoid.info blockchair.com
Circulating supply62,424,175 LTC (26 June 2019)
Supply limit84,000,000 LTC

    History

    Litecoin was released via an open-source client on GitHub on October 7, 2011 by Charlie Lee, a Google employee and former 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

    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. 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.

    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]

    gollark: Because of that updates are nonexistent after a year or so, and updating means a full reboot and stuff.
    gollark: You have to download something like 40GB of stuff to build an Android system image because of course it's all one giant monolithic image.
    gollark: Their OSes are kind of bloated because Android is stupid.
    gollark: I did really quite like the aesthetic of the actual Nokia Lumia hardware they had, but... Windows.
    gollark: The only person I've seen with one is a more Microsoft-liking friend.

    See also
    • List of scrypt crypto currencies

    References
    1. "Litecoin v0.17.1". litecoin.org. Retrieved 2019-05-06.
    2. "Ex-Googler Gives the World a Better Bitcoin". WIRED. Retrieved 2017-10-25.
    3. "Litecoin founder Charlie Lee has sold all of his LTC". TechCrunch. Retrieved 2018-08-20.
    4. Charlton, Alistair (2013-11-28). "Litecoin value leaps 100% in a day as market cap passes $1bn". International Business Times, UK Edition. Retrieved 2013-12-16.
    5. Steadman, Ian (2013-05-11). "Wary of Bitcoin? A guide to some other cryptocurrencies". Ars Technica. Retrieved 2014-01-19.
    6. Coventry, Alex (2012-04-25). "Nooshare: A decentralized ledger of shared computational resources" (PDF). Self-published. Retrieved 2012-09-21. These hash functions can be tuned to require rapid access a very large memory space, making them particularly hard to optimize to specialized massively parallel hardware.
    7. Haferkorn, Martin; Quintana Diaz, Josué Manuel (2015). Lugmayr, Artur (ed.). "Seasonality and Interconnectivity Within Cryptocurrencies - An Analysis on the Basis of Bitcoin, Litecoin and Namecoin". Enterprise Applications and Services in the Finance Industry. Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing. Cham: Springer International Publishing: 106–120. doi:10.1007/978-3-319-28151-3_8. ISBN 978-3-319-28151-3.
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