Litecoin

Litecoin

Official Litecoin logo
Denominations
Subunit
 0.001 mLTC (millicoin)
 0.000001 µLTC (microcoin)
 0.00000001 Litoshi
Plural Litecoin, Litecoins, LTCs
Symbol LTC, Ł
Demographics
Date of introduction 7 October 2011 (2011-10-07)
User(s) International
Valuation
Inflation Limited release (geometric series, rate halves every 4 years reaching a final total of 84 million LTC)
 Method Increasing difficulty per every 2016 blocks produced.

Litecoin (LTC or Ł[1]) is a peer-to-peer cryptocurrency and open source software project released under the MIT/X11 license.[2] Inspired by and technically nearly identical to bitcoin (BTC), Litecoin creation and transfer is based on an open source protocol and is not managed by any central authority.[2][3]

After Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Ripple, Litecoin is the fourth-largest true cryptocurrency by market capitalization.[4]

History

Litecoin was released via an open-source client on GitHub on October 7, 2011 by Charles Lee, a former Google employee.[5] It was a fork of the Bitcoin-Qt client, differing primarily by having a decreased block generation time, increased maximum number of coins, different hashing algorithm (scrypt, instead of SHA-256[6]), 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.[7]

Litecoin reached a $1 billion marketcap in November 2013.[8] As of February 2016, its market capitalization is US$136,512,971 with the price at $3 levels.[9]

Development

Litecoin version 0.8.5.1 was released in November 2013. The release included fixes for vulnerabilities and added enhanced security to the Litecoin network.

The Litecoin developer team released version 0.8.6.1 in early December 2013. The new version offered a 20x reduction in transaction fees, along with other security and performance improvements in the client and network. The source code and binaries were released early to people in the "#litecoin" IRC channel, on the official Litecoin forums, and on Reddit, with information for power users to add a Litecoin supernode to the configuration file, while the main site was to be updated after enough of the network was running the new version. This release method was used to ensure that the low fee transactions from version 0.8.6.1 clients would not be delayed by clients running older versions.

In April 2014, a new version of Litecoin was released, version 0.8.7.1, which fixed some minor issues along with an important fix related to the Heartbleed security bug.

Differences from Bitcoin

Litecoin offers three key differences from Bitcoin.

The original intended purpose of using Scrypt was to allow miners to mine both Bitcoin and Litecoin at the same time.[5] The choice to use scrypt was also partially to avoid giving advantage to video card (GPU), FPGA and ASIC miners over CPU miners; although Charlie Lee has never publicly agreed with this opinion.

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.[12]This is widely due to the Scrypt hashing scheme being more memory intensive; increasing memory requirements for ASICs and FPGAs. However, as of December 2015, ASIC miners are widely available and the primary method of mining Litecoin.

Transactions

A peer-to-peer network similar to bitcoin's handles Litecoin's transactions, balances and issuance through scrypt, the proof-of-work scheme (Litecoins are issued when a small enough hash value is found, at which point a block is created, the process of finding these hashes and creating blocks is called mining). The issuing rate forms a geometric series, and the rate halves every 840,000 blocks, roughly every four years, reaching a final total of 84 million LTC.

Litecoins are currently traded primarily for both fiat currencies and other cryptocurrencies, mostly on online exchanges. To avoid the danger of chargebacks, reversible transactions, such as those with credit cards, are not normally used to buy litecoins as Litecoin transactions are irreversible.

Addresses

Payments in the Litecoin network are made to addresses, which are Base58-encoded hashes of users' public keys. They are strings of 33 numbers and letters which always begin with the letter L.

Confirmations

Litecoin transactions are recorded in the Litecoin blockchain (a ledger held by most clients). A new block is added to the blockchain roughly every 2.5 minutes (whenever a small enough hash value is found for the proof-of-work scheme). A transaction is usually considered complete after six blocks, or 15 minutes, though for smaller transactions, fewer than six blocks may be needed for adequate security.

Wallets

The most common Wallet available today is "Litecoin Core" for Linux, Windows and Mac OS. Litecoin Core is an offline wallet based on the Bitcoin Core wallet.

On January 19, 2014, the Litecoin Android wallet was released. This new release replaces the old Android client which contained major security issues.

A new Litecoin Electrum client — a lightweight wallet for Litecoin — was released for beta testing on April 10, 2014. As with other Litecoin Dev projects, the client is based on the bitcoin source and the Litecoin developers fix issues upstream in order to make it easier to keep the Litecoin version updated. As with the Litecoin Android wallet, this new version of Electrum for Litecoin replaces the old and unsupported version created in the first year of Litecoin's release.

Exchanges

As of February 2015 there are many exchanges that deal with Litecoin. Although some exchanges allow only trading between litecoins and bitcoins, many exchanges provide trading between litecoins and US dollars (247exchange, Bitfinex, BTC-e, OKCoin, BitBay), Euros (Kraken, Yacuna), and Chinese Yuan (Huobi, BTC China, OKCoin).[13]

See also

References

  1. ↑ "Litecoin charts". ltc-charts.com. Retrieved 2014-01-19.
  2. 1 2 3 "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. ↑ "Crypto-Currency Market Capitalizations". coinmarketcap.com. Retrieved 2016-09-25.
  5. 1 2 Coblee (user id) (2011-10-09). "[ANN] Litecoin — a lite version of Bitcoin. Launched!". Post on Bitcointalk.org internet forum. Retrieved 2014-05-03. Using Scrypt allows one to mine Litecoin while also mining Bitcoin.
  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 Charts - Litecoin Cryptocurrency Blockchain Explorer". Retrieved 2016-02-09.
  10. ↑ Steadman, Ian (2013-05-11). "Wary of Bitcoin? A guide to some other cryptocurrencies". Ars Technica. Retrieved 2014-01-19.
  11. ↑ Percival, Colin. "Stronger key derivation via sequential memory-hard functions" (PDF). Self-published. Retrieved 2013-04-24.
  12. ↑ 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.
  13. ↑ "Bitfinex LTCUSD". Cryptowat.ch. Retrieved 9 February 2015.
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