Litecoin
| Litecoin | |
|---|---|
Official Litecoin logo
|
|
| Denominations | |
| Subunit | |
| 0.001 | mLTC (millicoin) |
| 0.000001 | µLTC (microcoin) |
| 0.00000001 | Litoshi |
| Plural | Litecoin, Litecoins, LTCs |
| Symbol | LTC, Ł |
| Demographics | |
| Date of introduction | 7 October 2011 |
| User(s) | International |
| Valuation | |
| Inflation | Limited release (geometric series, rate halves every 4 years reaching a final total of 84 million LTC) |
| Method | Increasing difficulty per every 2016 blocks produced. |
Litecoin (LTC or Ł) is a peer-to-peer and open source software project released under the MIT/X11 license. Inspired by and 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.
After Bitcoin, Ethereum and , Litecoin is the fourth-largest true cryptocurrency by market capitalization.
Litecoin was released via an open-source client on GitHub on October 7, 2011 by Charlie Lee, a former Google employee. 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.
During the month of November 2013, the aggregate value of Litecoin experienced massive growth which included a 100% leap within 24 hours.
Litecoin reached a $1 billion marketcap in November 2013. As of May 9, 2017, its market capitalization is US$1,542,657,077 with the price at $30.23 levels.
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 Zurich to San Francisco in under one second.
Litecoin version 0.8.5.1 was released in November 2013. The release included fixes for vulnerabilities and added enhanced security to the Litecoin network.
The Litecoin developer team released version 0.8.6.1 in early December 2013. The new version offered a 20x reduction in transaction fees, along with other security and performance improvements in the client and network. The source code and binaries were released early to people in the "#litecoin" IRC channel, on the official Litecoin forums, and on Reddit, with information for power users to add a Litecoin supernode to the configuration file, while the main site was to be updated after enough of the network was running the new version. This release method was used to ensure that the low fee transactions from version 0.8.6.1 clients would not be delayed by clients running older versions.
...
Wikipedia