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Litecoin (LTC) is widely seen as the first successful alternative cryptocurrency (altcoin). It was created back in 2011 as a fork of Bitcoin, and features near-zero cost peer-to-peer transactions.
It differs from the flagship cryptocurrency in a number of ways, however, with reduced transaction confirmation times, lower fees, a larger maximum supply of 84 million LTC, and other different technical aspects.
LTC is often referred to as the “silver to Bitcoin’s gold,” and just like BTC it runs on an open-source blockchain that isn’t controlled by any central authority. It can be mined through a Proof-of-Work consensus algorithm, with miners being rewarded for adding new blocks to the blockchain. Its mining algorithm initially attempted to reduce the effectiveness of specialized mining equipment, but it was unsuccessful in doing so.
Just like Bitcoin, Litecoin undergoes halving events, in which the coinbase reward for miners who find blocks on the network is halved.
The cryptocurrency was created by former Google engineer Charlie Lee, who referred to it as a “lite version of Bitcoin” at one point. Lee is a computer scientist and a graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who worked at Google before creating the cryptocurrency.
After creating Litecoin, Lee went on to work as Director of Engineering at cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase. Since taking up the role, Lee largely stopped focusing on Litecoin’s development, although the community kept supporting the cryptocurrency.
In late 2017, Lee left Coinbase to work on developing Litecoin full-time. Now, he serves as the managing director of a non-profit organization dedicated to LTC, the Litecoin Foundation.
Litecoin, like Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, has a finite supply and periodically reduces the amount of LTC entering the system, ensuring its inflation is transparent and predictable. Traders have relied on Litecoin as an alternative to Bitcoin which has managed to remain popular throughout the years.
Litecoin is nowadays used to pay for goods and services through various payment processors. Because it’s less popular than Bitcoin and has several other changes made to it, LTC transactions are relatively cheap and settle faster.
The cryptocurrency is often also used as a testing ground for new technologies before they are implemented on the Bitcoin network. Litecoin was first to implement Segregated Witness (SegWit), which “segregates” a transaction’s digital signature data (the witness) outside of it to use limited block space better, even though the technology was first proposed for Bitcoin.
LTC also implemented the Lightning Network, a layer-two scaling solution, before Bitcoin. Many used Litecoin’s Lightning Network to test the network, which relies on user-generated payment channels, in a real economic environment. The first Lightning Network transactions using LTC transferred 0.00000001 LTC from Zurich to San Francisco in under one second.
Blockchain data provided by: Blockchair (Main Source), CryptoID (Backup), and WhatToMine (Block Time only)
Try our free Litecoin (LTC) portfolio tracker if you want to efficiently keep track of your LTC and other coin/token investments.