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Litecoin

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This is an old revision of this page, as edited by 195.13.198.146 (talk) at 15:13, 8 February 2018 (Addition of Litecoin Cash fork information.). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

Litecoin
Official Litecoin logo
Denominations
PluralLitecoin
SymbolŁ
CodeLTC
Precision10−8
Subunits
 1⁄1000lites
 1⁄1000000photons
 1⁄100000000litoshis
Development
Original author(s)Charlie Lee
Initial release0.1.0 / 7 October 2011; 12 years ago (2011-10-07)
Latest release0.14.2 / 21 November 2017; 6 years ago (2017-11-21)
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
Ledger
Timestamping schemeProof-of-work
Hash functionscrypt
Block reward25 LTC (approximately to 2019), halved approximately every four years
Block time2.5 minutes
Block explorerexplorer.litecoin.net chainz.cryptoid.info
Circulating supply54,535,183 LTC (29 December 2017)
Supply limit84,000,000 LTC
Administration
Issuing authorityIssuance decentralized, block reward
Website
Websitelitecoin.org litecoin.com

Litecoin (LTC or Ł[1]) is a peer-to-peer cryptocurrency and open source software project released under the MIT/X11 license.[2] Creation and transfer of coins is based on an open source cryptographic protocol and is not managed by any central authority.[2][3] 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.[4] The Litecoin network went live on October 13, 2011.[5] 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.[6]

During the month of November 2013, the aggregate value of Litecoin experienced massive growth which included a 100% leap within 24 hours.[7]

Litecoin reached a $1 billion market capitalization in November 2013.[8] By late November 2017, its market capitalization was US$4,600,081,733 ($85.18 per coin).[9][10] By mid-December 2017, the coin's marketcap had reached US$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.[11] 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.[12]

On block 1371111 Litecoin will be officially forked to Litecoin Cash[13] and and Litecoin holders will receive 1:10 Litecoin Cash[14] tokens.

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.[2][15]
  • 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.[16]

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.[17]

See also

References

  1. ^ "Litecoin charts". ltc-charts.com. Archived from the original on 2014-01-18. Retrieved 2014-01-19. {{cite web}}: Unknown parameter |deadurl= ignored (|url-status= suggested) (help)
  2. ^ a b c "Litecoin.org". litecoin.org. Retrieved 2014-01-19.
  3. ^ Satoshi, Nakamoto. "Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System" (PDF). Bitcoin.org. Retrieved 24 April 2013.
  4. ^ "Ex-Googler Gives the World a Better Bitcoin". WIRED. Retrieved 2017-10-25.
  5. ^ "When should Litecoin be launched?". bitcointalk.org. {{cite web}}: |access-date= requires |url= (help); Missing or empty |url= (help)
  6. ^ "Block hashing algorithm".
  7. ^ 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.
  8. ^ Cohen, Reuven (2013-11-28). "Crypto-currency bubble continues: Litecoin surpasses billion dollar market capitalization". Forbes. Retrieved 2014-01-19.
  9. ^ "Litecoin (LTC) price, charts, market cap, and other metrics - CoinMarketCap". coinmarketcap.com.
  10. ^ "Litecoin Charts - Litecoin Cryptocurrency Blockchain Explorer". Retrieved 2017-11-26.
  11. ^ Blockstream [@Blockstream] (10 May 2017). "Blockstream's Christian Decker @Snyke completes first Lightning network payment on Litecoin. See. Blog post soon!" (Tweet) – via Twitter.
  12. ^ Russell, Rusty. "Lightning on Litecoin". Blockstream. Retrieved 12 May 2017.
  13. ^ "Litecoin Cash – The First Litecoin Fork". CCN. 2018-02-08. Retrieved 2018-02-08.
  14. ^ "Litecoin Cash [#LCC]: 5961 blocks left until #SHA256 #Litecoin fork #LitecoinCash is released!". litecoinca.sh. Retrieved 2018-02-08.
  15. ^ Steadman, Ian (2013-05-11). "Wary of Bitcoin? A guide to some other cryptocurrencies". Ars Technica. Retrieved 2014-01-19.
  16. ^ Percival, Colin. "Stronger key derivation via sequential memory-hard functions" (PDF). Self-published. Retrieved 2013-04-24.
  17. ^ 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.
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