Brief Litecoin History

Litecoin, one of the earliest “altcoins,” created by Charlie Lee in October 2011. The official abbreviation for Litecoin is LTC. Litecoin is similar to bitcoin in most aspects relevant to the developers of the cryptocurrency. The cryptocurrency has continued to evolve since its creation and by 2017 Litecoin upgrade its software to activate Segregated Witness aka SegWit. The Lightning Network was fully implemented into Litecoin by August 2017.

During 2017 the value of Litecoin skyrocketed from around $4 to over $290.  In late 2017 Litecoin creator Charlie Lee announce he had sold or donated 100% of his Litecoin holdings. Despite rumors that Charlie Lee has quit any association with Litecion he is still involved in Litecoin’s growth. By late 2018 the price had fallen to as low as $25 before rebounding to approximately $145 in mid-2019.

Currently, the block reward is 25 LTC every time a miner processes a block. This is scheduled to “halve” in mid-2019. Prior to the increase in value from early to mid-2019 many speculated whether miners would continue to be interested in Litecoin, although the recent increase in value has likely put down those fears.

In February 2019 Litecoin officially changed its logo to a blue background as seen above.

What makes Litecoin different?

The main difference between Litecoin and Bitcoin involve transaction confirmation speed and the hashing algorithm. Bitcoin blocks are processed every 10 minutes on average while Litecoin averages 4 times faster at around 2.5 minutes. Litecoin uses scrypt while bitcoin uses SHA-256 for its proof-of-work algorithm that miners use to generate blocks.

Litecoin is capped at 84 million total coins while Bitcoin is capped at 21 million. Litecoin has over 54 million coins in circulation as of mid-2019.

Litecoin users will need a Litecoin wallet. An official list of supported wallets is provided at https://litecoin.com/en/individuals

The future of Litecoin

With Bitcoin (BTC), Ethereum (ETH), and Ripple (XRP) all with a larger market capitalization than Litecoin it will be interesting to see if Litecoin can maintain its #4 position on the crypto capitalization rankings.

Be sure to hop on over and view the current price of Litecoin and other cryptos.

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