What is litecoin

Litecoin (LTC) is a cryptocurrency project and open source peer-to-peer software released under MIT / X11 license. Inspired by and technically almost identical to Bitcoin (BTC), litecoin creation and transfer are based on open source protocols and not managed by the central authority.
After Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Ripple, litecoin is the fourth-largest true cryptocurrency based on market capitalization.

Litecoin was released via an open-source client at GitHub on October 7, 2011 by Charles Lee, a former Google employee. The fork of the Bitcoin-Qt client, differs primarily by having a decrease in block generation time, increased maximum number of coins, different hashing algorithms (scrypt, not SHA-256), and slightly modified GUIs.
During November 2013, the aggregate value of litecoons experienced substantial growth which included a 100% jump within 24 hours.

Litecoin reached a $ 1 billion marketcap in November 2013. In December 2016, its market capitalization was US $ 177.4 million at a price of $ 3.60.


Litecoin version 0.8.5.1 was released in November 2013. The release includes 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 transaction cost reduction, along with security and other improvements in client and network performance. Source code and binaries released early for people on IRC channel #litecoin ", in official litecoin forums, and Reddit, with information for power users to add litecoin supernodes to the configuration file, while the main site is to be updated after enough networking runs new version. This release method is used to ensure that low cost transactions from version 0.8.6.1 clients will not be delayed by the client running the old version.

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

Differences from Bitcoin

Litecoin offers three major differences from Bitcoin.The litecoin Network aims to process blocks every 2.5 minutes instead of Bitcoin this 10 minutes, which developers claim allows for faster transaction confirmation. Weaknesses are a higher probability of orphaned blocks. Benefits may include greater resilience for multiple expenditure attacks over the same period of bitcoin. However, the amount of work done is a consideration. For example, if litecoit Networks have relatively ten times less computing work done per block than bitcoin networks, bitcoin confirmation is about ten times harder to reverse, although litecoone Networks are likely to add confirmation blocks at a rate four times faster.Litecoin uses scrypt in its proof-of-work algorithm, sequential hard-memory functions require asymptotic memory over an algorithm that is not memory-hard.The Litecoin Network will generate 84 million Litecoins, or four times as many currency units as those issued by the Bitcoin Network.The originally intended goal of using scrypt is to allow miners to mine both Bitcoin and litecoin at the same time. The option to use scrypt is also partially to avoid giving advantage to video card (GPU), FPGA and miner ASIC more miners CPU.Because of the use of litecoin for scrypt algorithms, FPGA and ASIC devices made for more complicated litecoin mining to make and more expensive to produce than they are for bitcoin, which uses SHA-256. This is widely because schema hashing schemes become more memory intensive; improve memory requirements for ASICs and FPGAs.A peer-to-peer network similar to Bitcoin handles transactions, balances and issuance of litecoin through scrypt, proof-of-work schemes (Litecoins are issued when a small enough hash value is found, where a block point is created, the process of finding this hash and creating block called mining). The level issuing forms a geometry series, and the portion of each 840,000 blocks, approximately every four years, reaches the final total of 84 million LTC.Litecoin transactions are recorded in blockchain litecoin (the ledger owned by most clients). A new block is added to the blockchain approximately every 2.5 minutes (each time a small enough hash value is found for the proof-of-work scheme). Transactions are usually considered complete after six blocks, or 15 minutes, although for smaller transactions, less than six blocks may be required for adequate security.Source from Wikipedia