Litecoin features faster transaction confirmation times and improved storage efficiency than the leading math-based currency. With substantial industry support, trade volume and liquidity, Litecoin is a proven medium of commerce complementary to Bitcoin.
Who Are the Founders of Litecoin?
Litecoin was created by Charlie Lee, a former Google engineer and director of engineering at Coinbase. He launched Litecoin in October 2011 as a fork of Bitcoin, meaning that it shares the same codebase and history up until a certain point, but then diverges into its own blockchain with different rules and parameters.
Lee’s vision was to create a “silver” to Bitcoin’s “gold”, a cryptocurrency that would be more accessible, scalable and practical for everyday use.
Why is Litecoin Important?
Litecoin is important because it is one of the oldest, most established and most widely adopted cryptocurrencies in the world. It has a loyal community of users, developers and merchants who support its growth and innovation. It also serves as a testing ground for new technologies and features that may later be implemented on Bitcoin, such as Segregated Witness (SegWit), Lightning Network and MimbleWimble.
Litecoin is also important because it offers an alternative to fiat currencies and traditional payment systems, allowing people to transact freely, securely and cheaply across borders.
What Makes Litecoin Unique?
Litecoin is unique because it has several advantages over Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. Some of these advantages are:
- Faster transactions: Litecoin’s average block time is 2.5 minutes, compared to Bitcoin’s 10 minutes. This means that transactions are confirmed faster on the Litecoin network, which improves user experience and security.
- Lower fees: Litecoin’s transaction fees are significantly lower than Bitcoin’s, especially during periods of high network congestion. This makes Litecoin more affordable and efficient for small-value transactions.
- More scalability: Litecoin can handle more transactions per second than Bitcoin, thanks to its faster block time and higher block size limit. This means that Litecoin can accommodate more users and activity without sacrificing performance or security.
- Different mining algorithm: Litecoin uses a proof-of-work algorithm called Scrypt, which is more memory-intensive than Bitcoin’s SHA-256. This makes Litecoin mining more accessible to ordinary users with consumer-grade hardware, and less prone to centralization by large mining pools or specialized equipment.
- More coins: Litecoin has a total supply of 84 million coins, four times more than Bitcoin’s 21 million. This means that each Litecoin is divisible into 100 million units, or “litoshi”, compared to Bitcoin’s 100 million units, or “satoshi”. This gives Litecoin more granularity and flexibility in terms of pricing and valuation.
What are the Key Features of Litecoin?
Some of the key features of Litecoin are:
- SegWit: SegWit is a protocol upgrade that separates the transaction data from the signature data, allowing more transactions to fit in a block and reducing the size and cost of transactions. SegWit also enables the activation of second-layer solutions such as Lightning Network, which can facilitate instant and low-cost micropayments.
- Lightning Network: Lightning Network is a decentralized network of payment channels that operate on top of the Litecoin blockchain, allowing users to send and receive payments without broadcasting them to the whole network. Lightning Network can increase the speed, scalability and privacy of transactions, as well as enable cross-chain atomic swaps with other cryptocurrencies.
- MimbleWimble: MimbleWimble is a privacy-enhancing technology that uses elliptic curve cryptography to hide the amounts and addresses involved in transactions, while still allowing verification by nodes. MimbleWimble also reduces the size of the blockchain by removing unnecessary data, improving its efficiency and scalability. MimbleWimble is implemented on Litecoin as an extension block, which is a parallel chain that runs alongside the main chain and periodically syncs with it.
Litecoin History
How did Litecoin Come About?
Litecoin came about as a result of Charlie Lee’s dissatisfaction with the state of Bitcoin in 2011. He noticed that Bitcoin was facing several challenges, such as slow transaction confirmation times, high fees, limited scalability and vulnerability to mining centralization. He decided to create a new cryptocurrency that would address these issues and offer a better alternative for everyday use.
