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| == Differences from Bitcoin == | == Uses, Technology, and Differences from Bitcoin == | ||
| Litecoin is different in some ways from ].{{Citation needed|date=December 2020}} | |||
| There are a few key differences between Litecoin and 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.<ref>{{cite news |first= Ian |last=Steadman|date=2013-05-11|url=https://arstechnica.com/business/2013/05/wary-of-bitcoin-a-guide-to-some-other-cryptocurrencies/ |title=Wary of Bitcoin? A guide to some other cryptocurrencies |work=Ars Technica |access-date=2014-01-19}}</ref> | |||
| * Litecoin uses ] in its ] algorithm, a sequential memory-hard function requiring ] more memory than an algorithm which is not memory-hard.{{Citation needed|date=December 2020}} | |||
| —The Litecoin Network processes a block every 2.5 minutes, rather than Bitcoin's 10 minutes. This allows Litecoin to confirm transactions much faster than Bitcoin. | |||
| Due to Litecoin's use of the scrypt algorithm, ] and ] devices made for mining Litecoin are more complicated to create and more expensive to produce than they are for Bitcoin, which uses SHA-256.<ref>{{cite web |first=Alex |last=Coventry |date=2012-04-25|title=Nooshare: A decentralized ledger of shared computational resources |url=http://mit.edu/alex_c/www/nooshare.pdf|publisher=Self-published |access-date=2012-09-21 |quote=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.}}</ref> | |||
| —Litecoin uses Scrypt in its proof-of-work algorithm, compared to Bitcoin's SHA-256. This makes Litecoin more secure and less prone to being 51% attacked compared to other coins that share Bitcoin's mining algorithm. | |||
| 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.<ref>{{Cite journal|last1=Haferkorn|first1=Martin|last2=Quintana Diaz|first2=Josué Manuel|date=2015|editor-last=Lugmayr|editor-first=Artur|title=Seasonality and Interconnectivity Within Cryptocurrencies - An Analysis on the Basis of Bitcoin, Litecoin and Namecoin|journal=Enterprise Applications and Services in the Finance Industry|series=Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing|volume=217|language=en|location=Cham|publisher=Springer International Publishing|pages=106–120|doi=10.1007/978-3-319-28151-3_8|isbn=978-3-319-28151-3|s2cid=33878873}}</ref> | |||
| —Litecoin has 84 million coins while Bitcoin has 21 million. | |||
| Litecoin maintains most of Bitcoin's key features, including 4 year halving cycles in which the amount of new coins gets reduced in half and a limited coin supply. | |||
| Due to Litecoin and Bitcoin's code similarities, it's common for updates to be be passed from one coin to the other. Most of Litecoin's code is pulled over from Bitcoin, meaning, Bitcoin developers are indirectly working on Litecoin. Because of this, Litecoin does not require a significant amount of core developers. | |||
| Litecoin has become known for being a payments and transaction-friendly coin due to its low fees and high liquidity, being available on nearly every exchange. Litecoin is also the second most available cryptocurrency on crypto-ATM's. Due to its low fees and liquidity, Litecoin is often used for inter-exchange trading and for sending funds from one location to another. | |||
| Because of its low fees and high liquidity, Litecoin usually ranks top 3 in 24 hour trading volume, occasionally trading more than its entire market cap. It also consistently trades more volume (in relation to respective market caps, by % basis) than Bitcoin and Ethereum. This transaction-heavy use-case is also what led the Litecoin community to focus on increasing user privacy. | |||
| Litecoin's MWEB upgrade will make Litecoin the most fungible cryptocurrency in the top 10 by market capitalization while increasing scalability and hiding transaction amounts from public viewers. | |||
| Litecoin is often referred to as a "test-bed" for Bitcoin because it has historically been able to implement certain technologies prior to Bitcoin, such as SegWit in 2017 and potentially once again with the upcoming MWEB upgrade. | |||
| Litecoin is also the only coin besides Bitcoin to have an actively running Lightning Network, a second-layer scaling solution. | |||
| == See also == | == See also == | ||
Revision as of 05:29, 15 May 2021
Cryptocurrency Official Litecoin logo | |
| Denominations | |
|---|---|
| Plural | Litecoins |
| Symbol | Ł |
| Code | LTC |
| Precision | 10 |
| Subunits | |
| 1⁄1000 | millilitecoin, mŁ |
| 1⁄1000000 | microlitecoins, photons, μŁ |
| Development | |
| Original author(s) | Charlie Lee |
| Initial release | 0.1.0 / 7 October 2011; 13 years ago (2011-10-07) |
| Latest release | 0.18.1 / 11 June 2020; 4 years ago (2020-06-11) |
| 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 |
| 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 | 66,752,415 LTC (3 May 2021) |
| Supply limit | 84,000,000 LTC |
| Administration | |
| Issuing authority | decentralized, block reward |
| Website | |
| Website | litecoin.org litecoin.com |
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. 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 who later became Engineering Director at Coinbase. 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.
Litecoin was created with the intention of being a fairer alternative to other cryptocurrencies that existed at the time, such as Tenebrix, Ixcoin, Solidcoin, to name a few. In 2011, much as we see today, the cryptocurrency space began to see an influx of experimental coins appear. Many of these coins carried issues with them such as coin creators pre-mining millions of coins for themselves, security issues or bugs in the code. Due to these limiting factors, Charlie Lee decided to follow the path that Bitcoin originally paved by launching Litecoin fairly, meaning, it was widely available for anyone to start mining from the beginning.
At the time of the launch in 2011, Bitcoin had only existed for a little over a year but had proven itself to be reliable and well-functioning within that time frame. Knowing that Bitcoin had the most proven track record, Charlie Lee decided to base Litecoin off of Bitcoin’s code — except, Litecoin was to utilize a different mining algorithm (Scrypt instead of SHA-256) and a faster block time of 2.5 minutes compared to Bitcoin’s 10, along with 4x the total amount of coins. Because of this decision, Litecoin dominates Scrypt mining, making it more secure and less prone to being attacked.
Litecoin is frequently described as the "silver" to Bitcoin's "gold" due to their similarities such as dominance of their respective mining algorithm's, their Proof-of-Work nature, four-year halving cycles and fair launch beginnings.
During the month of November 2013, the aggregate value of Litecoin experienced massive growth which included a 100% leap within 24 hours.
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.
Uses, Technology, and Differences from Bitcoin
There are a few key differences between Litecoin and Bitcoin.
—The Litecoin Network processes a block every 2.5 minutes, rather than Bitcoin's 10 minutes. This allows Litecoin to confirm transactions much faster than Bitcoin.
—Litecoin uses Scrypt in its proof-of-work algorithm, compared to Bitcoin's SHA-256. This makes Litecoin more secure and less prone to being 51% attacked compared to other coins that share Bitcoin's mining algorithm.
—Litecoin has 84 million coins while Bitcoin has 21 million.
Litecoin maintains most of Bitcoin's key features, including 4 year halving cycles in which the amount of new coins gets reduced in half and a limited coin supply.
Due to Litecoin and Bitcoin's code similarities, it's common for updates to be be passed from one coin to the other. Most of Litecoin's code is pulled over from Bitcoin, meaning, Bitcoin developers are indirectly working on Litecoin. Because of this, Litecoin does not require a significant amount of core developers.
Litecoin has become known for being a payments and transaction-friendly coin due to its low fees and high liquidity, being available on nearly every exchange. Litecoin is also the second most available cryptocurrency on crypto-ATM's. Due to its low fees and liquidity, Litecoin is often used for inter-exchange trading and for sending funds from one location to another.
Because of its low fees and high liquidity, Litecoin usually ranks top 3 in 24 hour trading volume, occasionally trading more than its entire market cap. It also consistently trades more volume (in relation to respective market caps, by % basis) than Bitcoin and Ethereum. This transaction-heavy use-case is also what led the Litecoin community to focus on increasing user privacy.
Litecoin's MWEB upgrade will make Litecoin the most fungible cryptocurrency in the top 10 by market capitalization while increasing scalability and hiding transaction amounts from public viewers.
Litecoin is often referred to as a "test-bed" for Bitcoin because it has historically been able to implement certain technologies prior to Bitcoin, such as SegWit in 2017 and potentially once again with the upcoming MWEB upgrade.
Litecoin is also the only coin besides Bitcoin to have an actively running Lightning Network, a second-layer scaling solution.
See also
References
- "Litecoin v0.18.1". litecoin.org. Retrieved 2020-10-08.
- ^ "Ex-Googler Gives the World a Better Bitcoin". WIRED. Retrieved 2017-10-25.
- "Litecoin founder Charlie Lee has sold all of his LTC". TechCrunch. Retrieved 2018-08-20.
- 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.
External links
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