Litecoin

Litecoin (LTC or Ł) is a peer-to-peer cryptocurrency created by Charlie Lee in October 2011. The Creation and transfer of coins is through an open source cryptographic protocol, and is not managed by any central authority. Litecoin is an open source software project under the MIT/X11 license.

In many regards Litecoin is technically nearly identical to Bitcoin, however, Litecoin claims some technical advantages over Bitcoin. For example, the block generation time of Litecoin is approximately 1/4 the block generation time of Bitcoin; making it four times faster. The reduced block time allows Litecoin to process faster transactions and increase throughput. The cost of speed improvements is a trade off between network propagation time to block creation time, which creates a variety of security tradeoffs.

Litecoin utilizes the scrypt hashing algorithm instead of Bitcoin's SHA256. Scrypt was made in 2014, and increases the difficulty of creating specialized Litecoin ASIC mining hardware.

Litecoin was an early adopter of the Segregated Witness update, adding it on May 10, 2017. Litecoin is also an early tester and developer of technologies such as the Lightning Network and atomic swap.

Litecoin is one of the oldest cryptocurrencies in existence, and a variety of decentralized projects have forked from the open source Litecoin codebase to create their own cryptocurrencies. Examples of cryptocurrencies forking from Litecoin directly, or originating from Litecoin forks, include Feathercoin, Dogecoin, Dash, Gulden, Reddcoin.