Overview

Litecoin is open-source software and a peer-to-peer cryptocurrency. The creation and transfer are based on an open-source cryptographic protocol that is not managed by the central authority.

Litecoin is open-source software and a peer-to-peer cryptocurrency. The creation and transfer are based on an open-source cryptographic protocol that is not managed by the central authority released under the MIT/X11 license. It facilitates the power to run, modify, copy the software and to distribute, modify copies of the software. The software is released in a transparent process that let the corresponding source code and independent verification of binaries occur.

It is a faster transaction confirmation (an average, 2.5 minutes) and it utilizes a memory-hard, scrypt-based mining PoW algorithm to target the regular computers and GPU which are its main differentials to Bitcoin. Just like bitcoin, the Litecoin network is scheduled to produce 84 million currency units with a halving in reward every 4 years. The coin was created by a Google employee named Charles Lee. It is in the second spot to Bitcoin which has spawned numerous clones, however, Litecoin has a dedicated development team and a solid base of support. Charles Lee leads a group of 6 software developers with a large community maintaining the current Litecoin project.

In May 2017 as stated by Market Cap, Litecoin became the first of the Top 5 Cryptocurrencies to implement the SegWit scaling solution. The first Lightning Network transaction was completed through litecoin, transferring 0.00000001 LTC from Zurich to San Francisco in under one second in May of the same year.

Miners at present are rewarded with 25 litecoins per block wherein an amount which gets halved roughly every 4 years which is every 840,000 blocks. Therefore, the litecoin network is programmed to produce 84 million litecoins which is 4 times as many currency units as Bitcoin.

A higher transaction volume can be handled by Litecoin blockchain than Bitcoin. The network supports more transactions without a need to modify the software in the future due to more frequent block generation. Resulting to merchants receiving faster confirmation times and yet having the ability to wait for more confirmations when selling bigger ticket items.