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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	0.21.4 / 2 March 2023; 21 months ago (2023-03-02)
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	Ł6.25 (as of August, 2 2023), (halved approximately every four years)
Block time	2.5 minutes
Circulating supply	Ł75,310,895 (16 December 2024)
Supply limit	Ł84,000,000
Valuation
Exchange rate	US$123.02 (December 2024)
Administration
Issuing authority	decentralized, block reward
Website
Website	litecoin.org
Source code fork shouldn't be confused with hard forks or soft forks.

Litecoin (Abbreviation: LTC; sign: 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 lower transaction fees, 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

Lee released Litecoin via an open-source client on GitHub on October 7, 2011. The Litecoin network went live on October 13, 2011.

Litecoin was a source code fork of the Bitcoin Core client, originally differing 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.

2017–2021

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.

2022–present

In May 2022, MWEB (Mimblewimble Extension Blocks) upgrade was 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. According to Motherboard, "Scrypt was chosen because it theoretically prevents the use of ASICs, those specialized chips that greatly increase mining power and efficiency (though there is debate over the validity of this claim).".
• Litecoin is merge mined with another prominent cryptocurrency, Dogecoin.
• Litecoin has a maximum circulating supply of Ł84,000,000, which is four times larger than Bitcoin's maximum circulating supply of ₿21,000,000.
• 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.

Third party vendors providing point of sale infrastructure for Litecoin include BitPay.

See also

• List of scrypt crypto currencies

References

1. renaming of mLTC/μLTC to lites/photons https://github.com/litecoin-project/litecoin/pull/375 Archived 2021-12-08 at the Wayback Machine
2. "Litecoin Core v0.21.4 Release". litecoin.org. 7 November 2024. Retrieved 2024-12-16.
3. ^ "Litecoin (LTC) Price Today". Revolut. Retrieved 2024-12-16.
4. ^ "Ex-Googler Gives the World a Better Bitcoin". WIRED. Archived from the original on 2018-07-09. Retrieved 2017-10-25.
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6. Miglietti, Cynthia; Kubosova, Zdenka; Skulanova, Nicole (20 May 2019). "Bitcoin, Litecoin, and the Euro: an annualized volatility analysis". Studies in Economics and Finance. 37 (2): 229–242. doi:10.1108/SEF-02-2019-0050. S2CID 199363476.
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9. ^ Ismail, Ashiana. "Permissioned blockchains for real world applications." PhD diss., 2020.
10. ^ Hake, Mark R. (February 14, 2022). "Litecoin Should See Broader Appeal With New Privacy Technology". Nasdaq. Archived from the original on July 15, 2022. Retrieved July 14, 2022.
11. Browne, Ryan (2017-12-20). "Litecoin founder Charlie Lee says he's sold all his holdings in the cryptocurrency". CNBC. Archived from the original on 2021-02-02. Retrieved 2024-02-01.
12. ^ Lee, David, ed. (May 5, 2015). Handbook of Digital Currency: Bitcoin, Innovation, Financial Instruments, and Big Data. Elsevier Science. ISBN 9780128023518.
13. "scrypt page on the Tarsnap website". Archived from the original on 28 May 2019. Retrieved 21 January 2014.
14. Deng, Robert H. (3 August 2017). Handbook of Blockchain, Digital Finance, and Inclusion, Volume 1: Cryptocurrency, FinTech, InsurTech, and Regulation. United Kingdom: Elsevier Science. ISBN 9780128104422.
15. "Litecoin founder Charlie Lee has sold all of his LTC". TechCrunch. Archived from the original on 2021-02-21. Retrieved 2018-08-20.
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19. Murdock, Jason (2021-04-14). "How to mine dogecoin as 129 billion tokens in circulation". Newsweek. Archived from the original on 2022-07-13. Retrieved 2022-07-13.
20. BBC (2020) "PayPal allows Bitcoin and crypto spending", October 21. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-54630283 Archived 2021-11-10 at the Wayback Machine
21. Crypto with PayPal is here Archived 2022-01-20 at the Wayback Machine, PayPal.com
22. "Walmart denies tieup with litecoin, fake statement rattles cryptocurrency". Reuters. 2021-09-13. Archived from the original on 2022-10-15. Retrieved 2021-09-13.
23. "MWEB Has Officially Activated". Litecoin Foundation. 2022-05-20. Archived from the original on 2022-05-26. Retrieved 2022-06-01.
24. 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 Archived 2022-07-12 at the Wayback Machine
25. 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.
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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
• Internet properties established in 2011