Litecoin is a peer-to-peer cryptocurrency and open source software project released under the MIT/X11 license. Litecoin is nearly identical to Bitcoin, with some technical differences.
Litecoin was released via an open-source client on GitHub on October 7, 2011 by Charlie Lee, a former Google employee. The Litecoin network went live on October 13, 2011. It was a fork of the Bitcoin Core client, differing primarily by having a decreased block generation time (2.5 minutes), increased maximum number of coins, different hashing algorithm (scrypt instead of SHA-256), and a slightly modified GUI. In May 2017, Litecoin became the first of the top-5 (by market cap) cryptocurrencies to adopt Segregated Witness.
Segregated witness allows for cheaper transactions going forward because it makes it unnecessary users to include transaction fees as high as the current ones.
In May 2017, Litecoin became the first of the top-5 (by market cap) cryptocurrencies to adopt Segregated Witness. In August 2017, it became the first of the top-10 cryptocurrencies in circulation to implement Lightning Network transactions. Litecoin is a fork from bitcoin core client. Most of its differences are minute and not easily visible to someone who isn't a developer or doesn't spend a lot of time looking at both codebases, but they're there. Here's a short list: Scrypt proof-of-work SHA256 hashing algorithm 4 times as many coins 84 million total coins 8 decimal places instead of 2 60 blocks per hour 30 minutes block target average confirmation time on target Average transaction fee: $0.23 Litecoin's market cap is over $2 billion and it has the second highest volume on all of cryptocurrency ($5,906,721,912 in the last 24 hours). Compared to other cryptocurrencies, it is incredibly stable and well-established. The total number of coins that will be mined is 84 million compared with Bitcoin's 21 million. Also unlike Bitcoin or many other competitors, there are no third party fees (like miner fees) built into transactions conducted on the network. Transaction fees are paid by users whose wallets utilize an optional "credit" system which pays for transactions when coins are sent back to the wallet from which they came; miners get nothing from this arrangement It's a great way to send money in an "off the chain" manner to any other user on the Litecoin network.
The app was designed using Apple's iOS SDK, which is proprietary. The username of the developer who made it is SatoshiLabs (which also happens to be the name of a Bitcoin company).
SegWit went live with Litecoin activation in May 2017.
Its purpose is to make transaction confirmations faster and cheaper when sending digital currency across the network or when running a full node . It does this by separating signature data from transactional data in each block of transactions. By removing signatures, SegWit paves way for an increase of 1MB in block size limit through a process known as hard fork, which requires consensus from network participants. The SegWit soft fork was activated on litecoin in May 2017, but a hard fork requires consensus from miners and nodes before it can be implemented.
The Lightning Network went live with Litecoin activation in August 2017.
Its purpose is to make transaction confirmations faster and cheaper when sending digital currency across the network or when running a full node. It does this by removing signatures from transactions, which reduces data transfer sizes by 90%. In theory, it will allow for instantaneous micro-transactions at little cost. Because of its speedy implementation , it also allows for another increase in block size limit through a process known as hard fork, which requires consensus from network participants. This lightning technology has been compared to a network of payment routes which can be opened between two nodes. This means that there are many different routes (called channels) that the transaction can flow down.
As with any cryptocurrency transactions are designed so people cannot cheat by copying existing coins or trying to claim new ones manually. Each has to be created cryptographically with an algorithm. But the problem is that, unlike physical coins, digital coins can be divided up to eight decimal places. So if you were sending someone ten Litecoin, it would take much longer for your computer to verify all of those details than it does to make a credit card payment using the same amount of funds.
