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Litecoin
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Litecoin
6 Full Logo S-2.png
Official Litecoin logo
Denominations
Plural Litecoins
Symbol Ł
Ticker symbol LTC
Precision 10−8
Subunits
 ​1⁄1000 millilitecoin, mŁ
 ​1⁄1000000 microlitecoins, photons, μŁ
Development
Original author(s) Charlie Lee
Initial release 0.1.0 / 7 October 2011; 9 years ago
Latest release 0.18.1 / 11 June 2020; 7 months ago
Code repository github.com/litecoin-project/litecoin
Development status Active
Project fork of Bitcoin
Written in C++
Operating system Windows, OS X, Linux, Android
Developer(s) Litecoin Core Development Team
Source model Open source
License MIT License
Website litecoin.org litecoin.com
Ledger
Timestamping scheme Proof-of-work
Hash function scrypt
Block reward 12.5 LTC (approximately till August 2023), halved approximately every four years
Block time 2.5 minutes
Block explorer ltc.bitaps.com explorer.litecoin.net chainz.cryptoid.info blockchair.com
Circulating supply 62,424,175 LTC (26 June 2019)
Supply limit 84,000,000 LTC
Litecoin (LTC or Ł) is a peer-to-peer cryptocurrency and open-source software project released under the MIT/X11 license. Litecoin was an early bitcoin spinoff or altcoin, starting in October 2011. In technical details, Litecoin is nearly identical to Bitcoin.


Contents
1 History
2 Differences from Bitcoin
3 See also
4 References
5 External links
History
Litecoin was released via an open-source client on GitHub on October 7, 2011 by Charlie Lee, a Google employee who later became Engineering Director at Coinbase. The Litecoin network went live on October 13, 2011.

It was a source code 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.

During the month of November 2013, the aggregate value of Litecoin experienced massive growth which included a 100% leap within 24 hours.

In May 2017, Litecoin became the first of the top 5 (by market cap) cryptocurrencies to adopt Segregated Witness. Later in May of the same year, the first Lightning Network transaction was completed through Litecoin, transferring 0.00000001 LTC from Zürich to San Francisco in under one second.

Differences from Bitcoin
Litecoin is different in some ways from Bitcoin.[citation needed]

The Litecoin Network aims to process a block every 2.5 minutes, rather than Bitcoin's 10 minutes. This allows Litecoin to confirm transactions much faster than Bitcoin.
Litecoin uses scrypt in its proof-of-work algorithm, a sequential memory-hard function requiring asymptotically more memory than an algorithm which is not memory-hard.[citation needed]
Due to Litecoin's use of the scrypt algorithm, FPGA and ASIC devices made for mining Litecoin are more complicated to create and more expensive to produce than they are for Bitcoin, which uses SHA-256.

When it comes to Litecoin as a method of payment, in early days there was correlation to Bitcoin in terms of extended payment patterns. Although one might assume that payment patterns of Litecoin would converge to Bitcoin, it has been found that there is little correlation of the payment patterns of Litecoin vs Bitcoin today, and these patterns continue to diverge over time