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Litecoin

Official Litecoin logo
Denominations
Plural	Litecoins
Symbol	Ł
Code	LTC
Precision	10
Subunits
1⁄1000	lites, millilitecoin, mŁ
1⁄1000000	microlitecoins, photons, μŁ
1⁄100000000	litoshis
Development
Original author(s)	Charlie Lee
Initial release	0.1.0 / 7 October 2011; 13 years ago (2011-10-07)
Latest release	0.21.2.1 / 7 June 2022; 2 years ago (2022-06-07)
Code repository	github.com/litecoin-project/litecoin
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
Circulating supply	70,715,481 LTC (14 July 2022)
Supply limit	84,000,000 LTC
Valuation
Exchange rate	US$126 (January 2022)
Administration
Issuing authority	decentralized, block reward
Website
Website	Official website

Litecoin (LTC or Ł) is a decentralized peer-to-peer cryptocurrency and open-source software project released under the MIT/X11 license. Inspired by Bitcoin, Litecoin was among the earliest altcoins, starting in October 2011. In technical details, the Litecoin main chain shares a slightly modified Bitcoin codebase. The practical effects of those codebase differences are transaction fees that are a fraction of those for Bitcoin, faster transaction confirmations, and faster mining difficulty retargeting. Due to its underlying similarities to Bitcoin, Litecoin has historically been referred to as the "silver to Bitcoin's gold." In 2022, Litecoin added optional privacy features via soft fork through the MWEB (MimbleWimble extension block) upgrade.

History

Pre-Litecoin

By 2011, Bitcoin mining was largely performed by GPUs. This raised concern in some users that mining now had a high barrier to entry, and that CPU resources were becoming obsolete and worthless for mining. Using code from Bitcoin, a new alternative currency was created called Tenebrix (TBX). Tenebrix replaced the SHA-256 rounds in Bitcoin's mining algorithm with the scrypt function, which had been specifically designed in 2009 to be expensive to accelerate with FPGA or ASIC chips. This would allow Tenebrix to have been "GPU-resistant", and utilize the available CPU resources from bitcoin miners. Tenebrix itself was a successor project to an earlier cryptocurrency which replaced Bitcoin's issuance schedule with a constant block reward (thus creating an unlimited money supply). However, the developers included a clause in the code that would allow them to claim 7.7 million TBX for themselves at no cost, which was criticized by users.

To address this, Charlie Lee, a Google employee who would later become engineering director at Coinbase, created an alternative version of Tenebrix called Fairbrix (FBX). Litecoin inherits the scrypt mining algorithm from Fairbrix, but returns to the limited money supply of Bitcoin, with other changes.

Creation and launch

Noting that earlier altcoins failed due to a lack of fairness, Lee planned Litecoin's launch intentionally to avoid premining and ninja mining. With the intention of creating "silver to Bitcoin's gold," Litecoin was developed both by combining the good attributes of previous cryptocurrencies and avoiding their pitfalls as observed by Lee. After posting Litecoin's defining features and purpose, Lee clarified the launch procedure and polled Bitcointalk.org participants to establish the preferred launch time. To improve miner distribution and participation from launch, Lee established a testnet and compiled a downloadable mining binary. Lee released Litecoin via an open-source client on GitHub on October 7, 2011. 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), faster difficulty retarget, and a slightly modified GUI.

2011–2016

After launch, the early growth of Litecoin was aided by its increasing exchange availability and liquidity on early exchanges such as BTC-e. During the month of November 2013, the aggregate value of Litecoin experienced massive growth which included a 100% leap within 24 hours.

In early 2014, Lee suggested merge-mining (auxPOW) Dogecoin with Litecoin to the Dogecoin community at large. In September 2014, Dogecoin began merge-mining with Litecoin, providing increased security for Dogecoin and a permanent block subsidy that previously was not available with Litecoin mining.

2017–2021

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.

In 2020, PayPal added the ability for users to purchase a derivative of Litecoin along with Bitcoin, Ethereum and Bitcoin Cash which could not be withdrawn or spent as part of its Crypto feature.

In September 2021, a fake press release was published on GlobeNewswire announcing a partnership between Litecoin and Walmart. This caused the price of Litecoin to increase by around 30%, before the press release was revealed as a hoax. In February 2022, Litecoin has reached a marketcap of $8.7 Billion.

2022–present

In May 2022, MWEB (Mimblewimble Extension Blocks) upgrade has officially been activated on the Litecoin network as a soft-fork. This upgrade provides users with the option of sending confidential Litecoin transactions, in which the amount being sent is only known between the sender and receiver.

In June 2022, PayPal added the ability for users to transfer Litecoin along with Bitcoin, Ethereum and Bitcoin Cash between PayPal to other wallets and exchanges.

Differences from Bitcoin

Litecoin is different in some ways from Bitcoin:

• The targeted block time is every 2.5 minutes for Litecoin, as opposed to Bitcoin's 10 minutes. This allows Litecoin to confirm transactions four times faster than Bitcoin.
• Scrypt, an alternative proof-of-work algorithm, is used for Litecoin. It differs from Bitcoin's SHA-256 algorithm in part by including a sequential memory-hard function, requiring asymptotically more memory than an algorithm which is not memory-hard.
• Litecoin is merge-mined with another prominent cryptocurrency (Dogecoin), increasing miner compensation and network security for both blockchains.
• Litecoin has a maximum circulating supply of 84,000,000 LTC, which is four times larger than Bitcoin's maximum circulating supply of 21,000,000 BTC.
• Both Litecoin and Bitcoin retarget their mining difficulty every 2016 blocks. However, due to the 4x faster block speed for Litecoin, mining difficulty retargets occur approximately every 3.5 days. This compares to approximately every 14 days for Bitcoin.
• MWEB optional privacy was added to Litecoin's base layer in May 2022 via soft fork. This allows amounts held within wallets and transaction amounts within MWEB to be private.

| timestamping = Proof-of-work (partial hash inversion) | issuance_schedule = Decentralized (block reward)
Initially ₿50 per block, halved every 210,000 blocks

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.

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.

See also

• List of scrypt crypto currencies

Notes

1. The supply will approach, but never reach, ₿21 million. Issuance will permanently halt c. 2140 at ₿20,999,999.9769.

References

1. renaming of mLTC/µLTC to lites/photons https://github.com/litecoin-project/litecoin/pull/375
2. "Litecoin v0.21.2.1". litecoin.org. 7 June 2022. Retrieved 2022-07-11.
3. ^ "Ex-Googler Gives the World a Better Bitcoin". WIRED. Archived from the original on 2018-07-09. Retrieved 2017-10-25.
4. ^ Gibbs, Toby; Yordchim, Suwaree (2014). "Thai Perception on Litecoin Value" (PDF). International Journal of Social, Education, Economics and Management Engineering. 8 (8): 2589–2591.
5. Miglietti, Cynthia; Kubosova, Zdenka; Skulanova, Nicole (20 May 2019). "Bitcoin, Litecoin, and the Euro: an annualized volatility analysis" (PDF). Studies in Economics and Finance.
6. Mandjee, Tara (2014). "Bitcoin, its legal classification and its regulatory framework". Journal of Business & Securities Law. 15.
7. Jumaili, Mustafa Lateef Fadhil; Karim, Sulaiman M (2021). "Comparison of two cryptocurrencies: Bitcoin and Litecoin". Journal of Physics: Conference Series. 1963 (1): 7.
8. ^ Ismail, Ashiana. "Permissioned blockchains for real world applications." PhD diss., 2020.
9. ^ Hake, Mark R. (February 14, 2022). "Litecoin Should See Broader Appeal With New Privacy Technology". Nasdaq. Retrieved July 14, 2022.
10. ^ Lee, David, ed. (May 5, 2015). Handbook of Digital Currency: Bitcoin, Innovation, Financial Instruments, and Big Data. Elsevier Science. ISBN 9780128023518.
11. "scrypt page on the Tarsnap website". Retrieved 21 January 2014.
12. Deng, Robert H. Handbook of Blockchain, Digital Finance, and Inclusion, Volume 1: Cryptocurrency, FinTech, InsurTech, and Regulation. United Kingdom: Elsevier Science. ISBN 9780128104422.
13. "Litecoin founder Charlie Lee has sold all of his LTC". TechCrunch. Archived from the original on 2021-02-21. Retrieved 2018-08-20.
14. "Charlie Lee Sums Up Litecoin's 10 Years History. Part One: Fair Launch". NewsBTC. 2021-10-08. Retrieved 2022-07-12.
15. Charlton, Alistair (2013-11-28). "Litecoin value leaps 100% in a day as market cap passes $1bn". International Business Times, UK Edition. Archived from the original on 2013-12-03. Retrieved 2013-12-16.
16. Murdock, Jason (2021-04-14). "How to mine dogecoin as 129 billion tokens in circulation". Newsweek. Retrieved 2022-07-13.
17. BBC (2020) "PayPal allows Bitcoin and crypto spending", October 21. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-54630283
18. Crypto with PayPal is here, PayPal.com
19. "Walmart denies tieup with litecoin, fake statement rattles cryptocurrency". Reuters. 2021-09-13. Retrieved 2021-09-13.
20. "MWEB Has Officially Activated". Litecoin Foundation. 2022-05-20.
21. PAYPAL (2022) "PayPal Users Can Now Transfer, Send, and Receive Bitcoin, Ethereum, Bitcoin Cash, and Litecoin", June 21. https://newsroom.paypal-corp.com/2022-06-07-PayPal-Users-Can-Now-Transfer-Send-and-Receive-Bitcoin-Ethereum-Bitcoin-Cash-and-Litecoin
22. Steadman, Ian (2013-05-11). "Wary of Bitcoin? A guide to some other cryptocurrencies". Ars Technica. Archived from the original on 2014-01-16. Retrieved 2014-01-19.
23. Nakamoto; et al. (1 April 2016). "Bitcoin source code - amount constraints". GitHub. Archived from the original on 1 July 2018.
24. Antonopoulos, Andreas M. (April 2014). Mastering Bitcoin: Unlocking Digital Crypto-Currencies. O'Reilly Media. ISBN 978-1-4493-7404-4.
25. Silveira, Adrián; Betarte, Gustavo; Cristiá, Maximiliano; Luna, Carlos (2021-09-04). "A Formal Analysis of the Mimblewimble Cryptocurrency Protocol". Sensors. 21 (17): 5951. doi:10.3390/s21175951. ISSN 1424-8220.{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: unflagged free DOI (link)
26. "Statement of Jennifer Shasky Calvery, Director Financial Crimes Enforcement Network United States Department of the Treasury Before the United States Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs Subcommittee on National Security and International Trade and Finance Subcommittee on Economic Policy" (PDF). fincen.gov. Financial Crimes Enforcement Network. 19 November 2013. Archived (PDF) from the original on 9 October 2016. Retrieved 1 June 2014.
27. Coventry, Alex (2012-04-25). "Nooshare: A decentralized ledger of shared computational resources" (PDF). Self-published. Archived (PDF) from the original on 2013-01-12. 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.
28. 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. 217. Cham: Springer International Publishing: 106–120. doi:10.1007/978-3-319-28151-3_8. ISBN 978-3-319-28151-3. S2CID 33878873.

External links

• Litecoin Foundation

• Economics
• Free and open-source software
• Internet
• Numismatics

• Currencies without ISO 4217 code
• 2011 software
• Cryptocurrency projects
• Currencies introduced in 2011
• Computer-related introductions in 2011