Litecoin

Litecoin

Official Litecoin logo
Denominations
Subunit
 0.001 mLTC (millicoin)
 0.000001 µLTC (microcoin)
 0.00000001 Litoshi
Plural Litecoin, Litecoins, LTCs
Symbol LTC, Ł
Demographics
Date of introduction 7 October 2011 (2011-10-07)
User(s) International
Valuation
Inflation Limited release (geometric series, rate halves every 4 years reaching a final total of 84 million LTC)
 Method Increasing difficulty per every 2016 blocks produced.

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] While inspired by, and in most regards technically nearly identical to Bitcoin (BTC), Litecoin has some technical improvements over Bitcoin, and most other major cryptocurrencies, such as the adoption of Segregated Witness, and the Lightning Network.[4] These effectively allow a greater number of transactions to be processed by the network in a given time, reducing potential bottlenecks, as seen with Bitcoin.[5] Litecoin also has almost zero payment cost and facilitates payments approximately four times faster than Bitcoin.[6]

History

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

During the month of November 2013, the aggregate value of Litecoin experienced massive growth which included a 100% leap within 24 hours.[8]

Litecoin reached a $1 billion marketcap in November 2013.[9] As of May 9, 2017, its market capitalization is US$1,542,657,077 at around $30 per coin.[10][11]

In May 2017, Litecoin became the first of the top-5 (by market cap) cryptocurrencies to adopt Segregated Witness.[12] Later in May of the same year, the first Lightning Network transaction was completed through litecoin, transferring 0.00000001 LTC from Zurich to San Francisco in under one second.[13]

Development

Litecoin version 0.8.5.1 was released in November 2013. The release included fixes for vulnerabilities and added enhanced security to the Litecoin network.

The Litecoin developer team released version 0.8.6.1 in early December 2013. The new version offered a 20x reduction in transaction fees, along with other security and performance improvements in the client and network. The source code and binaries were released early to people in the "#litecoin" IRC channel, on the official Litecoin forums, and on Reddit, with information for power users to add a Litecoin supernode to the configuration file, while the main site was to be updated after enough of the network was running the new version. This release method was used to ensure that the low fee transactions from version 0.8.6.1 clients would not be delayed by clients running older versions.

In April 2014, a new version of Litecoin was released, version 0.8.7.1, which fixed some minor issues along with an important fix related to the Heartbleed security bug.

Differences from Bitcoin

Litecoin offers three key differences from Bitcoin.

The original intended purpose of using Scrypt was to allow miners to mine both Bitcoin and Litecoin at the same time. The choice to use scrypt was also partially to avoid giving advantage to video card (GPU), FPGA and ASIC miners over CPU miners.

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.[16] This is widely due to the Scrypt hashing scheme being more memory intensive; increasing memory requirements for ASICs and FPGAs.

See also

References

  1. ↑ "Litecoin charts". ltc-charts.com. Retrieved 2014-01-19.
  2. 1 2 3 "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. ↑ "Litecoin's SegWit Activation: Why it Matters and What's Next - CoinDesk". CoinDesk. 2017-04-26. Retrieved 2017-06-09.
  5. ↑ "Bitcoin Scaling Problem, Explained". CoinTelegraph. Retrieved 2017-06-09.
  6. ↑ "Litecoin Block Time chart". bitinfocharts.com. Retrieved 2017-06-09.
  7. ↑ "Block hashing algorithm".
  8. ↑ 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.
  9. ↑ Cohen, Reuven (2013-11-28). "Crypto-currency bubble continues: Litecoin surpasses billion dollar market capitalization". Forbes. Retrieved 2014-01-19.
  10. ↑ https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/litecoin/
  11. ↑ "Litecoin Charts - Litecoin Cryptocurrency Blockchain Explorer". Retrieved 2016-02-09.
  12. ↑ https://twitter.com/Blockstream/status/862420329888595969
  13. ↑ Russell, Rusty. "Lightning on Litecoin". Blockstream. Retrieved 12 May 2017.
  14. ↑ Steadman, Ian (2013-05-11). "Wary of Bitcoin? A guide to some other cryptocurrencies". Ars Technica. Retrieved 2014-01-19.
  15. ↑ Percival, Colin. "Stronger key derivation via sequential memory-hard functions" (PDF). Self-published. Retrieved 2013-04-24.
  16. ↑ 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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