LTC in a Nutshell

What is Litecoin? LTC (Litecoin) was created on November 9, 2011, by Charlie Lee. It was created to improve on Bitcoin and shares many features with Bitcoin. With a total supply of 84 million and an average block time of 2.5 minutes, LTC halves its block reward every 4 years. It works on the Proof-of-Work consensus protocol and the initial block reward was 50 LTC.

LTC’s Interception

Litecoin was developed by Charlie Lee, a former Google engineer who graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Intrigued by Bitcoin, he bought and mined it with a regular computer while thinking about how to create a better digital currency system.

Charlie Lee cloned the source code of Tenebrix, one of the many altcoins available at that time, tweaked a few parameters, and created the altcoin Fairbix. However, Fairbix’s pre-mining was condemned by the community, and a bug was found in the software. Fairbix ended up hastily.

Following that failure, Lee immediately moved on to create another project. This time, he cloned the source code of Bitcoin, tweaked a few parameters, and created Litecoin.

Principle of LTC

LTC, as an improved version of Bitcoin, is designed to make transactions more affordable and efficient transactions than the Bitcoin network. Instead of using Bitcoin's SHA-256 algorithm, Litecoin employs another hash function, Scrypt. The function can generate a new block about every 2.5 minutes, while Bitcoin blocks take 10 minutes on average to confirm. 

Scrypt was initially developed by the LTC development team. The team aimed to build its own decentralized mining ecosystem outside of the Bitcoin system, in order to mitigate the risk of a 51% attack. In the early days, it was easier for users with traditional GPU and CPU cards to mine on Scrypt. Later, however, ASIC mining machines were developed to mine LTC more efficiently. The machines have edged out GPU and CPU mining. How to mine Litecoin? You can try Bitdeer‘s cloud hashrate plans, place an online order to participate in LTC mining, and get LTC rewards on a daily basis

Advantages of LTC

LTC is a convenient payment method. With faster transactions and lower gas fees, LTC is accepted as a transaction currency by many merchants.

As LTC shares some features with Bitcoin, developers often use LTC as a "testing ground"  for blockchain technology before applying it to Bitcoin. Examples of this include Segregated Witness (SegWit) and Lightning Network.

Milestones

⬤ October 7, 2011 —— LTC released an open-source client, marking the advent of LTC.

⬤ July 3, 2013 —— Mt. Gox launched an API for LTC trading in preparation for its official launch.

⬤ June 2014 —— LTC core v0.10.2.2 was released.

⬤ August 26, 2015 —— LTC experienced  its first halving, with the block reward being reduced from 50 LTC to 25 LTC.

⬤ July 3, 2016 —— The LTC core development team and the Litecoin Association released the Litecoin Core and Litecoin Association Road Map 2016, announcing a major release featuring "Segregated Witness", "Lightning Network”, "Smart Contracts", and other improvements.

⬤ April 2017 —— The Litecoin Foundation was officially registered in Singapore to provide financial support to the development team.

⬤ May 11, 2017 —— Segregated Witness was officially activated in the 1,201,536th block of LTC.

⬤ June 21, 2017 —— The LTC Lightning Network was launched.

⬤ August 8, 2019 —— LTC experienced its second halving, with the block reward being reduced from 25 LTC to 12.5 LTC.

Answer the following questions to test your LTC knowledge:
1.What is the total supply of LTC?
2.Who created LTC?
3.How often does LTC halving take place?