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This article assumes the reader has a basic familiarity with cryptocurrency & blockchain technology & how Bitcoin works.

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Introduction

Litecoin is one of the most popular cryptocurrencies currently in circulation, with the 5th largest market cap. Litecoin (LTC) is a peer-to-peer cryptocurrency and open-source software project released under the MIT/X11 license. Creation and transfer of coins is based on an open source cryptographic protocol and is not managed by any central authority. Litecoin was an early bitcoin spinoff or altcoin, starting in October 2011.

A Bit of History

Litecoin was first created in 2011, by Charlie Lee, a developer who previously worked for Google. Its establishment came just two years after Satoshi Nakamoto announced the release of Bitcoin, which is why many have labelled Litecoin as being the 'silver' to the more popular Bitcoin's 'gold'. Litecoin's key features are its speed of transaction (it processes blocks in 2.5 minutes, compared to Bitcoin's 10 minutes) and cheaper fees.

2013 was the year in which Litecoin really started to take off. In November of that year, LTC grew in value by 100% over a period of just 24 hours and reached a $1 billion market capitalisation. This progression established it as the second most valuable cryptocurrency, after its rival Bitcoin.

In May 2017, Litecoin was the subject of the first Lightning Network transaction when 0.00000001 LTC was sent from Zürich to San Francisco in under one second. Litecoin had a stellar year in 2017 – the year in which cryptocurrencies started to reach a wider audience. Between January and December 2017, its price rose from $4 to $350, a return of over 8000%. Today Although it has now grown its market capitalisation to over $9 billion, Litecoin has, in recent months, been superceded by cryptocurrencies such as Ethereum and XRP.

A crash in the market in March 2018 is partly to blame for this decrease in valuation. Despite this, Litecoin is currently the world's fifth most valuable cryptocurrency – a strong position to hold in what is becoming a gradually more saturated market.

What is Litecoin?

Litecoin is a peer-to-peer Internet currency that enables instant, near-zero cost payments to anyone in the world. Litecoin is an open source, global payment network that is fully decentralized without any central authorities. Mathematics secures the network and empowers individuals to control their own finances.

Litecoin features faster transaction confirmation times and improved storage efficiency than the leading math-based currency.

With substantial industry support, trade volume and liquidity, Litecoin is a proven medium of commerce complementary to Bitcoin.

How Is Litecoin different to Bitcoin?

More transactions per block. The Litecoin blockchain is capable of handling higher transaction volume than its counterpart - Bitcoin. Due to more frequent block generation, the network supports more transactions without a need to modify the software in the future. As a result, merchants get faster confirmation times, while still having ability to wait for more confirmations when selling bigger ticket items.

More coins produced total. Miners are currently awarded with 50 new Litecoins per block, an amount which gets halved roughly every 4 years (every 840,000 blocks). The Litecoin network is therefore scheduled to produce 84 million Litecoins, which is 4 times as many currency units as Bitcoin.

Wallet encryption and passwords. Wallet encryption allows you to secure your wallet, so that you can view transactions and your account balance, but are required to enter your password before spending Litecoins. This provides protection from wallet-stealing viruses and trojans as well as a sanity check before sending payments.

Litecoin is an open source software 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 software is released in a transparent process that allows for independent verification of binaries and their corresponding source code.

Litecoin Explainer Video

Note: This video is from the Litecoin website and may be biased. For more information about Litecoin, please visit https://litecoin.com/. 

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