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Litecoin

Official Litecoin logo
Denominations
Plural	Litecoin
Symbol	Ł
Code	LTC
Precision	10
Subunits
1⁄1000	lites
1⁄1000000	photons
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	0.14.2 / 21 November 2017; 7 years ago (2017-11-21)
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	25 LTC (approximately to 2019), halved approximately every four years
Block time	2.5 minutes
Block explorer	explorer.litecoin.net chainz.cryptoid.info
Circulating supply	54,535,183 LTC (29 December 2017)
Supply limit	84,000,000 LTC
Administration
Issuing authority	Issuance 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. Creation and transfer of coins is based on an open source cryptographic protocol and is not managed by any central authority. 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. 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.

Litecoin reached a $1 billion market capitalization in November 2013. By late November 2017, its market capitalization was US$4,600,081,733 ($85.18 per coin). 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. Traiding with litecoin such as other cruptocurrensy, is driving for an more transparant world. As the security of our personell information it will produce a more open market. Wish will in return to that what is it that are being traded over the net.

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 February 2018, one of the major EU online retailer Alza began accepting Litecoin as a payment method.

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.
• 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.

Litecoin Core historical releases

The reference client, Litecoin Core, maintains periodic releases. The majority of the development is rebased from the Bitcoin Core developers and its contributors. All Litecoin specific changes are developed and maintained by the Litecoin Core developers and various contributors.

See also

• Crypto-anarchism
• Private currency
• List of scrypt crypto currencies

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. ^ "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 (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. "Bitcoin už není jedinou kryptoměnou podporovanou Alza.cz - E15.cz". E15.cz. Retrieved 2018-02-10.
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.
17. "Litecoin Core v0.10.4.0 – Litecoin Project". Litecoin Project. 2015-12-23. Retrieved 2018-02-11.
18. "Litecoin Core v0.13.2 – Litecoin Project". Litecoin Project. 2017-01-12. Retrieved 2018-02-11.
19. "Litecoin Core v0.13.3 Release Candidate – Litecoin Project". Litecoin Project. 2017-07-18. Retrieved 2018-02-11.
20. "Litecoin Core v0.14.2 Release – Litecoin Project". Litecoin Project. 2017-08-01. Retrieved 2018-02-11.
21. "Litecoin Core v0.15.0.1 Release Candidate – Litecoin Project". Litecoin Project. 2017-09-22. Retrieved 2018-02-11.
22. "Litecoin Core v0.15.1 Release Candidate – Litecoin Project". Litecoin Project. 2018-02-08. Retrieved 2018-02-11.

External links

• Official website

• Economics
• Free software
• Internet
• Numismatics

• Currencies without ISO 4217 code
• 2011 software
• Alternative currencies
• Cryptocurrencies