An alternative cryptocurrency called Litecoin (LTC) was developed in October 2011 by Charles “Charlie” Lee, a former Google developer. With a few changes, the open-source code of Bitcoin was modified to create Litecoin. Similar to Bitcoin, Litecoin is built on an international payment network that is open-source and decentralised. A few key differences between Litecoin and Bitcoin are its usage of Scrypt (pronounced “es-scrypt”) as a proof of work mechanism and its quicker block creation rate.
History of Litecoin
Litecoin is considered to be among the first altcoins, derived from Bitcoin’s original open-source code. Initially, it was a strong competitor to Bitcoin. However, as the cryptocurrency market has become more saturated and competitive, Litecoin’s popularity has waned somewhat.
Litecoin has always been viewed as a reaction to Bitcoin. In fact, when creator Charlie Lee announced the début of Litecoin on a popular Bitcoin forum, he called it the “lite version of Bitcoin.”. For this reason, Litecoin has many of the same features as Bitcoin, while also adapting and changing some other aspects that the development team felt could be improved.
Litecoin was developed by Charlie Lee, a graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and a former Google engineer who became interested in Bitcoin in 2011. According to Lee, “In October of 2011, I was playing around with the Bitcoin codebase, and I guess the short of it was that I was just trying to create…a fork of Bitcoin. It was mainly a fun side project.”
Like Bitcoin, the maximum number of LTC is fixed. There will never be more than 84 million Litecoin in circulation. Every 2.5 minutes, the Litecoin network generates a new block—a ledger entry of recent Litecoin transactions.
The block is verified by mining software and made visible to any system participant who wants to see it. Once a miner verifies it, the next block enters the chain, which is a record of every Litecoin transaction ever made.
There are incentives for mining Litecoin: the first miner to successfully verify a block is rewarded with 6.25 Litecoin. As with Bitcoin, the number of Litecoin awarded for such a task reduces with time. In August 2019, it was halved, then in August 2023, and the halving will continue at regular intervals until the 84,000,000th Litecoin is mined. The Litecoin Foundation estimates it will be around 2142 when the maximum of 84 million Litecoin will be reached.
Segwit
Segregated Witness (Segwit) was first proposed for Bitcoin in 2015. It works by “segregating” the digital signal data (the “witness”) outside the base block in the blockchain. Segwit was developed to address Bitcoin’s scalability issue, but the proposal created deep controversy within the Bitcoin community.
In 2017, Litecoin adopted Segwit, and because of Litecoin’s similarity to Bitcoin, it worked as a testing ground or testnet for Segwit’s viability on the larger Bitcoin network. The test was a success, and Bitcoin adopted Segwit thereafter. Some opponents of the Segwit adoption who advocated for larger Bitcoin block sizes created a Bitcoin hard fork that resulted in Bitcoin Cash.
Lightning Network
The Lightning Network is a second-layer technology for Bitcoin that uses micropayment channels to scale its blockchain’s capability to conduct transactions.
Similar to the Segwit example, the implementation of the Lightning Network on Litecoin was a test net to prove innovations are possible on Bitcoin. Charlie Lee has also argued that when “the Bitcoin blockchain is congested, and the fees are high, it’s easy to use Litecoin to onboard onto the Lightning Network.” Litecoin integrated the Lightning Network in 2018.
Future Plans for Litecoin
Litecoin has implemented several features since its launch intended to improve its transaction speed without compromising the security and integrity of the network. According to Litecoin, there’s one project left (on its project page) to integrate into the blockchain, called MimbleWimble.
MimbleWimble is a privacy protocol that builds on confidential transactions that encrypt or obscure information like transaction amounts. It is argued that MimbleWimble can decrease block size and increase scalability. Charlie Lee announced in early 2019 that Litecoin would pursue MimbleWimble development, which is underway (as of October 2023).
Where Can you Buy Litecoin
LTC is available on most crypto exchanges (such as AFRIDAX) against other cryptos like BTC or ETH and national currencies like dollars and Euro and Rands.
Litecoin is a cryptocurrency created from a fork of the Bitcoin blockchain but with several changes. It is faster, will have more coins available, and uses a different algorithm than Bitcoin.