What is Litecoin?


Litecoin (Abbreviation: LTC; sign: Ł) is a decentralized peer-to-peer cryptocurrency and open-source software project released under the MIT/X11 license. Inspired by Bitcoin, Litecoin was among the earliest altcoins, starting in October 2011.[3][4] In technical details, the Litecoin main chain shares a slightly modified Bitcoin codebase. The practical effects of those codebase differences are lower transaction fees,[5] faster transaction confirmations,[4] and faster mining difficulty retargeting. Due to its underlying similarities to Bitcoin, Litecoin has historically been referred to as the "silver to Bitcoin's gold."[6][7][8] In 2022, Litecoin added optional privacy features via soft fork through the MWEB 

Units and divisibility

The unit of account of the litecoin system is the litecoin. Currency codes for representing litecoin is LTC. Its Unicode character is Ł.


One litecoin is divisible to eight decimal places. Units for smaller amounts of litecoin are lites, millilitecoin (mŁ), equal to 1⁄1000 litecoin, photons, microlitecoin (μŁ), equal to 1⁄100000 and the litoshi, which is the smallest possible division, and named in homage to bitcoin's smallest denomination the satoshi, representing 1⁄100000000 (one hundred millionth) litecoin.


Pre-Litecoin

By 2011, Bitcoin mining was largely performed by GPUs. This raised concern in some users that mining now had a high barrier to entry, and that CPU resources were becoming obsolete and worthless for mining. Using code from Bitcoin, a new alternative currency was created called Tenebrix (TBX). Tenebrix replaced the SHA-256 rounds in Bitcoin's mining algorithm with the scrypt function,[10] which had been specifically designed in 2009 to be expensive to accelerate with FPGA or ASIC chips.[11] This would allow Tenebrix to have been "GPU-resistant", and utilize the available CPU resources from bitcoin miners. Tenebrix itself was a successor project to an earlier cryptocurrency which replaced Bitcoin's issuance schedule with a constant block reward (thus creating an unlimited money supply).[10] However, the developers included a clause in the code that would allow them to claim 7.7 million TBX for themselves at no cost, which was criticized by users.[12]


To address this, Charlie Lee, a Google employee who would later become engineering director at Coinbase,[13] created an alternative version of Tenebrix called Fairbrix (FBX).[3] Litecoin inherits the scrypt mining algorithm from Fairbrix, but returns to the limited money supply of Bitcoin, with other changes.


Creation and launch

Noting that earlier altcoins failed due to a lack of fairness, Lee planned Litecoin's launch intentionally to avoid premining and ninja mining.[14] With the intention of creating "silver to Bitcoin's gold," Litecoin was developed both by combining the good attributes of previous cryptocurrencies and avoiding their pitfalls as observed by Lee. After posting Litecoin's defining features and purpose, Lee clarified the launch procedure and polled Bitcointalk.org participants to establish the preferred launch time. To improve miner distribution and participation from launch, Lee established a testnet and compiled a downloadable mining binary. Lee released Litecoin via an open-source client on GitHub on October 7, 2011. The Litecoin network went live on October 13, 2011.


It was a source code fork of the Bitcoin Core client, originally differing by having a decreased block generation time (2.5 minutes), increased maximum number of coins, different hashing algorithm (scrypt, instead of SHA-256), faster difficulty retarget, and a slightly modified GUI