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Litecoin

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Litecoin
Official Litecoin logo
Denominations
PluralLitecoins
SymbolŁ
CodeLTC
Precision10−8
Subunits
 1⁄1000millilitecoin, mŁ
 1⁄1000000microlitecoins, photons, μŁ
Development
Original author(s)Charlie Lee
Initial release0.1.0 / 7 October 2011; 12 years ago (2011-10-07)
Latest release0.16.3[1] / 19 September 2018; 5 years ago (2018-09-19)
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 till 2019), halved approximately every four years
Block time2.5 minutes
Block explorerexplorer.litecoin.net chainz.cryptoid.info blockchair.com
Circulating supply59,223,113 LTC (19 November 2018)
Supply limit84,000,000 LTC
Administration
Issuing authoritydecentralized, block reward
Website
Websitelitecoin.org litecoin.com

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.[2] Litecoin was an early bitcoin spinoff or altcoin, starting in October 2011.[3] In technical details, litecoin is nearly identical to Bitcoin.

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.[3][4][5] 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.[6]

Litecoin reached a $1 billion market capitalization in November 2013.[7]

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.

On December 29th, 2018 Litecoin became the first cryptocurrency to sponsor a major sporting event when the Litecoin Logo appeared on the mat of the Octagon for UFC 232.

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.[8]
  • 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.[9]

See also

References

  1. ^ "Litecoin v0.16.3". litecoin.org. Retrieved 2018-10-23.
  2. ^ Satoshi, Nakamoto. "Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System" (PDF). Bitcoin.org. Retrieved 24 April 2013.
  3. ^ a b "Ex-Googler Gives the World a Better Bitcoin". WIRED. Retrieved 2017-10-25.
  4. ^ "Litecoin vs. Ethereum". Retrieved 2018-08-20.
  5. ^ "Litecoin founder Charlie Lee has sold all of his LTC". TechCrunch. Retrieved 2018-08-20.
  6. ^ 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.
  7. ^ Cohen, Reuven (2013-11-28). "Crypto-currency bubble continues: Litecoin surpasses billion dollar market capitalization". Forbes. Retrieved 2014-01-19.
  8. ^ Steadman, Ian (2013-05-11). "Wary of Bitcoin? A guide to some other cryptocurrencies". Ars Technica. Retrieved 2014-01-19.
  9. ^ 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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