litecoin is a peer-to-peer cryptocurrency and open source project released under the MIT/X11 license which gives you the power to run, modify, and copy the software and to distribute, at your option, modified copies of the software. The Litecoin Network is seen as PayPal 2.0 because it’s fast & cheap to use. It has a faster block generation rate and hence offers a faster transaction confirmation.

Litecoin was released in October 2011 by former Google Engineer Charles Lee. It is often described as the silver to Bitcoin’s gold. Litecoin is 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.

“Litecoin is one of the most proven crypto-currency experiments on the market and its proof-of-work algorithm uses scrypt, a different form of encryption, than Bitcoin’s SHA 256. As a result, there has been a recent surge of interest in Litecoin on bitcoin trading platforms.”

“Litecoin has been one of the most talked about alternative cryptocurrencies as of late. In this article we take a look at what Litecoins are, how they’ve spiked in value recently and whether it’s a good idea to invest money into them.”

The release of Litecoin was announced via a post on the Cryptography Mailing List titled “Announcing Litecoin: A CPU-Friendly Bitcoin.”

“The main difference between Bitcoin and Litecoin is that Litecoin has decreased its generation time by twofold. The overall number of coins that can be created has also increased fourfold with an additional four years added to the Litecoin network.”

The creator of Litecoin, Charlie Lee, is a former Google employee who claims to have had the initial idea for the establishment of Litecoin sometime in 2011. He decided to create a lighter version of Bitcoin after discovering that a friend of his had begun mining bitcoins but after a few days he was only able to mine around 200 coins. The reason for this was that the friend’s computer could not calculate hashes at a fast enough rate, so Lee came to the conclusion that there needed to be another cryptocurrency that was easier to mine with regular computers.

“Litecoin (ticker: LTC or Ł) is a peer-to-peer cryptocurrency and open source software project released under the MIT/X11 license. Inspired by, and in most regards technically nearly identical to Bitcoin (BTC), Litecoin creation and transfer is based on an open source protocol and is not managed by any central authority.”

The cryptocurrency 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. Litecoin was an early bitcoin spinoff or altcoin, starting in October 2011. In technical details, litecoin is nearly identical to Bitcoin.

“Litecoins are currently traded mostly against Bitcoin but can also be used with some online merchants that accept them directly. Litecoin is becoming popular with currency traders, who use it as a proxy for the value of Bitcoin.”

“A peer-to-peer network similar to bitcoin’s handles Litecoin’s transactions, balances and issuance through scrypt, the proof-of-work scheme (Litecoins are issued when a small enough hash value is found, at which point a block is created, the process of finding these hashes and creating blocks is called mining). The issuing rate forms a geometric series, and the rate halves every 840,000 blocks, roughly every four years.”

“All in all it seems like more and more people are believing in Litecoin. Although there is a strong community of Bitcoin supporters we think we should not ignore projects that offer different qualities. The cryptocurrency Litecoin (LTC/Ł) has recently grown to become one of the top three cryptocurrencies (in terms of capitalization). In this article, we will explain what is special about Litecoin and why you could call it “silver for Bitcoin’s gold.”

“The course of Bitcoin and Litecoin is going to diverge at some point in the future, but it remains an interesting phenomenon that a currency with a market cap of just 2 million dollars has been able to surpass a currency worth over 1 billion dollars. The original question if “silver could defeat gold” has already happened in the cryptocurrency world, with Litecoin taking the place of silver.”