Introduction to Litecoin – Digital Silver

Litecoin is a persistent precursor in the run to the cryptocurrency payment. With technological limitations, many Bitcoin (BTC) investors have moved to Litecoin (LTC), an open source fork of Nakamoto's original cryptocurrency with founder Charlie Lee.

As a faster and cheaper version of Bitcoin, Litecoin is almost technically identical to BTC, but with distinctive fundamental differences.

Litecoin strives to rival Bitcoin as a reserve of value while retaining its usefulness for daily transactions. Litecoin has achieved a top-5 status with a loyal community, bringing commercial volumes and liquidity.

What is Litecoin?

Litecoin has emerged as a "Light " alternative to Bitcoin, whose longevity of transactions is approaching 10 years.

Before Litecoin in the early years of 2010, Bitcoin existed with its slow and expensive transactions. The value of a truly decentralized peer-to-peer currency was a prospect for technological revolutionaries aware that Bitcoin's mechanisms would not work in the long run.

With the creation time of the 10-minute block of Bitcoin e extraction model, the supporters of cryptocurrency were looking for an alternative. Many original "altcoin" models have attempted models with negligible improvements. The same Charlie Lee was involved in pioneering attempts, creating Fairbrix, a fork of the creation of Tenebrix blocks that cut to 5 minutes.

Lee then decided to create another time altcoin capable of usurping Bitcoin. To tackle this problem, Litecoin came from a 2011 fork of the original Bitcoin protocol (which precedes an ICO) with subtle yet crucial modifications. Reduction of block creation time to 2.5 minutes and pumping supply to 84 million (quadruple of 21 million Bitcoins), Litecoin combined speed and safety.

Introduced as "silver to Bitcoin gold ", Litecoin does not intend to annex Bitcoin. Complementary rather than rivaling Bitcoin, LTC has prospered over its smaller competitors.

In the eyes of Lee, bitcoin has functioned as the ideal gold for substantial transactions and a long-term value reserve, while Litecoin favors smaller, cheaper, everyday transactions.

The founder of Litecoin, Charlie Lee, described his vision:

"My vision is that people use Litecoin every day to buy things, it's just the preferred method of payment."

After nearly a decade of development, this vision approaches fruition with the announcement of LitePay in February 2018, which allows users to spend LTC as if they were a debit or credit card. Scheduled for the launch of February 26, Litecoin was ready to enter the market and earned about 40% of the very first Cryptocurrency Point of Sale.

However, as many cryptocurrency investors are aware, the execution is what brings weight. LitePay closed the store on launch day and quoted "hostile actions by card issuers " and argues with the Litecoin Foundation for funding, both sufficient to derail the project.

Like everyone else, we were too enthusiastic about something that was too good to be true and we optimistically overlooked many of the warning signs. I'm sorry for advertising this company and I promised to do better due diligence in the future. https://t.co/khIjeHnyZ1

– Charlie Lee [LTC⚡] (@SatoshiLite) March 26, 2018

Despite this failure, Litecoin is one of the most used cryptocurrencies by numerous e-commerce vendors (ie eGifter) and blockchain-based video games.

How Litecoin works

Litecoin is just a few lines of code far from Bitcoin, the ecosystem uses PoW extraction and cryptography to achieve secure and peer-to-peer decentralization.

As for Bitcoin, a limited supply makes the 84 million units of Litecoin non-inflationary; in line with Lee's vision of money like digital silver. LTC coins are also tradable fractionally, a characteristic of a high value asset.

On the extraction front, Litecoin is a profitable endeavor, rewarding miners with 25 LTC per block (around $ 3500 at the current price of the currency). Prizes are halved every 840,000 blocks, approximately once every four years.

While the process is similar to Bitcoin, Litecoin scrypt algorithm it's simpler than Bitcoin SHA-256.

Deriving from algorithm of his previous attempt, Tenebrix, Lee claimed that extraction Litecoin could be done via a PC processor – but failed after Litecoin minibuses started using GPU, until the introduction of ASIC miners.

Technical teardown

No technical explanation of Litecoin can avoid mentioning Bitcoin, the inspiration for LTC mechanics.

Both: have a rustic Proof of work consensus, a difficulty of retarget bullseye painted on each block of 2016, supported by hard forks (Bitcoin Cash and Litecoin Cash) and offered an initial prize confirming the block of 50 units.

The two are almost architecturally identical, except for the fundamental differences that make Litecoin faster, cheaper and more efficient.

Litecoin's 2.5-minute block processing time allows faster confirmation of transactions, allowing the simultaneous processing of copious transactions. However, one disadvantage is that the Litecoin blockchain must be significantly larger than that of Bitcoin.

Imagining the two protocols are identical hashing power, Litecoin's creation time reduces the risk of double-expense attacks: a Bitcoin problem.

Finally, Litecoin scrypt it has no parallel processing power, which is problematic for Bitcoin miners to collect enough hardware, increasing the complexity of the network.

scrypt it requires large amounts of working memory, which has hampered the efforts of ASIC manufacturers. However, at the end of 2017 new ASIC the facilities were available for Litecoin minecan.

Litecoin's team

Ex-Googler and former technical director of Coinbase, Lee is one of Cryptosphere's most influential figures. It is revered by an admiration of worship by hundreds of thousands of people who love his ironic soliloquies and his ironic analysis of rival coins on Twitter.

It turns out that the super expensive collaboration of Verge was PornHub. "We think we have gained enough steam to allow us to penetrate the market". 😂@Pornhub, enough with foreplay. It is time to accept the true cryptocurrencies like BTC, LTC and XMR. 🚀
https://t.co/9IboL6LnNn

– Charlie Lee [LTC⚡] (@SatoshiLite) April 17, 2018

Lee's emotional statements continue to be addressed with anguish, despite the liquidation of all his LTC holdings in an attempt to counter the torrent of accusations.

Lee is the head of the 14-person development team, all with technical results available for access to GitHub. While many members reveal their true identity on the site, some members have pseudonyms, such as fancycedar (Fan Yang) o thrasher (Adrian Gallagher).

Where to buy Litecoin

As a top-10 currency, LTC is traded primarily on Coinbase, OKEx, Huobi, Bitfinex, Bit-Z and Binance, in order of volume.

Conclusion

Litecoin has exceeded the initial altcoin enemies and climbed the cryptocurrency world with several upcoming developments. Blockchains has made improvements in terms of speed, scalability and efficiency, with new consensus mechanisms that make PoW of Litecoin sluggish, despite being four times faster than Bitcoin.

Like Bitcoin, however, Litecoin has a hard persistence. Even with competitors like IOTA, Litecoin's market exposure has earned the currency a prolific user base, a ruthless commercial utility and a resolute community.

A correct implementation of the payment system will align Litecoin to its competitors as the owners spend and keep as they would fiat.