Litecoin

What is Litecoin (LTC)?

Litecoin is one of the oldest cryptocurrencies in existence. It has a significant reputation and an excellent track record, along with a very close connection to the "OG" of the space, Bitcoin.

Often regarded as "digital silver" as opposed to Bitcoin’s "digital gold," Litecoin differentiates itself by having cheaper transaction fees, faster transaction settlement, and an emphasis on merchant adoption.

Positioned primarily as a payment system rather than a store of value (more on that later), Litecoin also has extremely high liquidity thanks to its network effect. On top of that, it receives many upgrades in advance of Bitcoin.

When Was LTC Launched?

Rather than actually launching, Litecoin forked away from Bitcoin in 2011.

Litecoin’s open-source client was released to GitHub on the 7th of October, and the network itself went live on the 13th.

By 2011, Bitcoin was being mined using GPUs, although Satoshi Nakamoto, Bitcoin’s pseudonymous creator, originally intended for it to be done using CPUs. This was a concern for some, as mining had a high barrier to entry.

This led to the launch of a new cryptocurrency called Tenebrix. It used Scrypt instead of Bitcoin’s SHA-256 to make it GPU-resistant. However, Tenebrix’s distribution was questionable, and an alternative version called Fairbrix was created.

Litecoin, a source code fork of the Bitcoin Core client, inherits the Scrypt mining algorithm from Fairbrix but uses a scarce token supply similar to Bitcoin.

Who are the Founders of Litecoin?

Fairbrix was created by a former Google employee and future Coinbase engineering director named Charlie Lee.

Lee then released Litecoin via its open source client and then took the network live in October 2011.

Also known as "Chocobo", Lee is the managing director of the Litecoin Foundation, which develops Litecoin alongside the Litecoin Core Development team.

Besides Lee, the Litecoin Foundation’s board of directors includes Xinxi Wang, Alan Austin, and Zing Yang.

How Does Litecoin Work?

Like Bitcoin, Litecoin is a proof-of-work blockchain, or a distributed public ledger that is secured by computers called miners.

Transactions initiated by users of the network are grouped together to form sets called blocks. These new blocks, which also contain information about the previous block, are added to the chain and then validated by miners.

A block in the blockchain, therefore, is just a set of transactions. In Litecoin’s case, these transactions are validated via the processing of blocks every two and a half minutes—four times faster than Bitcoin.

What Makes Litecoin Unique?

Litecoin’s speed when creating blocks had an immediate effect given Bitcoin’s comparative slowness. Still, both are practically instant in comparison to the traditional financial system’s often glacial settlement speeds.

While being four times faster, Litecoin’s supply was also set at four times more than that of Bitcoin. This makes Litecoin scarce but more affordable and thus easier to use as a currency than Bitcoin.

While many cryptocurrencies exist that can process transactions faster and cheaper than Litecoin, it has the advantage of being established and battle-tested. It has grown to be accepted by thousands of merchants worldwide. Most cryptocurrency exchanges list Litecoin alongside Bitcoin.

How is Litecoin Secured?

Litecoin is secured by proof-of-work consensus using the Scrypt algorithm, where computers dedicate their computing power towards the network.

In practice, the mining computers try to solve mathematical puzzles in order to create new blocks to append to the blockchain. This process has a certain level of difficulty (which is typically very high), but is easy for the other nodes of the network to verify once achieved.

Mining can be expensive, but it is incentivized by block rewards, which is how new Litecoin is issued. When Litecoin first launched, this block reward was 50 LTC, but that amount continues to be reduced via 'halving'.

Similarly to Bitcoin, the block rewards on Litecoin continue to be halved in order to create scarcity over time. This reducing issuance and capped total supply makes Litecoin deflationary.

Litecoin block rewards are designed to halve every 840,000 blocks (approximately every four years), with the first halving coming on the 25th of August, 2015, and the second on the 5th of August, 2019.

The next halving is expected to happen on the 4th of August, 2023, when the Litecoin block reward will drop from the current 12.5 LTC to 6.25 LTC.

How is Litecoin Upgraded?

Litecoin is upgraded via a fork in the network, which is a change to the Litecoin protocol and causes a split in the transaction chain.

This results in a "main" chain and an alternative chain that creates a development structure and a chance for developers to apply upgrades and test their results.

What’s called a "hard fork" happens when the two chains created by the fork split and no longer communicate. This often results in the creation of a new currency, with the community also dividing with them.

Examples of currencies resulting from hard forks include Bitcoin Cash, Bitcoin Gold, Bitcoin SV, and Ethereum Classic.

Soft forks, meanwhile, are changes to the protocol that are backward compatible. This means that the new protocol will be recognized by the old nodes of the system, and a new currency won't be launched.

What is the Use of Litecoin?

Litecoin was originally designed to be, and still remains, a medium of exchange. Bitcoin’s inability to perfectly fulfill that role was quickly evident, and Litecoin was one of the first results. Since then, however, many competitors have emerged.

The network effect and time-in-market are advantages that Litecoin advertises. Although platforms like Ripple and its XRP Ledger can move funds faster and cheaper, Litecoin can point to greater decentralization and fewer legal challenges.

While perhaps not an entirely rational justification, its "lower price" compared to Bitcoin allows Litecoin to be a psychologically easier cryptocurrency to use as a medium of exchange.

However, LTC does have the economic attributes to be a store of value because of its overall scarcity and deflationary nature. For this reason, Litecoin is often referred to as "digital silver," compared to Bitcoin’s "digital gold" and Ethereum’s "digital oil."

What is Mimblewimble?

Mimblewimble, taking its name from a popular series of children’s fiction, is a blockchain protocol focused on privacy and scalability.

Developed by anonymous users, Mimblewimble features no addresses and fully confidential transactions with a relatively compact design for its distributed ledger.

Additionally, Mimblewimble also makes coins fungible. Given the transparency inherent to blockchain, the balances of certain accounts can be traced back to their origins, and those specific coins can be deemed tainted. Mimblewimble prevents this.

In October 2020, Litecoin launched a Mimblewimble testnet and the Mimblewimble Extension Block finally went live on the 19th of May, 2022.

In practice, users now have the ability to toggle Mimblewimble’s confidentiality feature on or off when making Litecoin transactions.

What is the Lightning Network?

The Lightning Network is a layer 2 solution for blockchains designed to speed up transactions and lower user fees.

The Lightning Network works via smart contracts, creating connections between users off-chain and making transactions using these channels. These channels can then be closed at any time and settle final balances on the main chain.

The main blockchain’s usage is reduced because all that is recorded is the opening and closing of the Lightning Network’s channels themselves. This means it doesn’t record all the users' transactions, which also enhances privacy.

Litecoin integrated the Lightning Network in 2017, serving in part as a testnet for eventual adoption by Bitcoin. However, the main goal of Litecoin’s adoption of the Lightning Network was the eventual overhauling of VISA in terms of scale.

At the time, VISA handled 24,000 transactions per second, while Litecoin only managed 2,600 per hour, so the need for a major boost to its scalability was clear.

In May 2022, Forbes estimated that Litecoin was able to process 54 transactions per second. This marks a significant improvement since the integration of the Lightning Network. That said, there’s still a lot of work to do in order to catch up with VISA.

Who Controls Litecoin?

Litecoin is controlled by the Litecoin Foundation, which oversees its development alongside the Litecoin Core Development team.

Founder Charlie Lee remains the head of the Foundation, while former banker Keith Yong holds the position of operations director. Beantown VP John Eidson, meanwhile, serves as Litecoin’s marketing director.

How Much Litecoin Is In Circulation?

Litecoin has a capped total supply maximum of 84 million LTC and, like Bitcoin, the continuous issuance of Litecoin is subject to halving.

This means that while the circulating supply of Litecoin is over 70 million as of June 2022, the maximum supply will not be reached for over a hundred years.

Unlike Bitcoin, however, 500,000 LTC was mined instantly on day 1 of Litecoin’s existence after the creation of its genesis block. However, the identity of the miner(s) involved has not been confirmed.

How Do You Buy Litecoin?

As one of the oldest major cryptocurrencies, LTC can be purchased on every major cryptocurrency exchange. You can also purchase Litecoin in peer-to-peer (P2P) transactions and at cryptocurrency ATMs.

Litecoin doesn’t have any decentralized exchanges of note built on it yet, despite smart contracts on Litecoin being a possibility since 2021 via a layer 2 called OmniLite.

Is It Possible to Buy LTC Instantly?

Instant purchases of Litecoin are only possible on cryptocurrency exchanges (CEX), although these don’t entail any actual settlement of funds.

While the LTC purchased will be reflected in your trading account, settlement only occurs when you withdraw it to a private wallet.

However, withdrawal from a CEX isn’t always a quick process. Due to AML (Anti Money Laundering) and KYC (Know Your Customer) procedures and batch processing, it may take a while before the withdrawal to your wallet is even initiated.

On the other hand, P2P transactions will simply depend on the block processing time of the blockchains. Since Litecoin’s is two and a half minutes, that’s as long as it’ll take for you to have your LTC appear in your wallet!

How Do You Store Litecoin?

Litecoin wallets work like Bitcoin wallets and are needed to store and manage LTC balances. Besides CEX accounts, there are two main types of wallets:

• Cold wallets. Cold wallets are offline and protect against any sort of online attacks or hacks. They often come in the form of hardware, such as a Ledger or Trezor wallet.
• Hot wallet. These connect to the internet, compromising a little safety for convenience. They could come in the form of a full-node client like the Litecoin Core wallet, or a simpler desktop app wallet like Electrum-LTC or the Atomic Wallet.

Litecoin’s Energy Consumption

Litecoin is a proof-of-work blockchain, which means that it is secured by a wide network of computers dedicating their computing power to the security of the network. The more computers are doing this, the more secure the network is.

However, that also necessitates significant energy consumption, which grows hand in hand with adoption.

While it is difficult to quantify the actual consumption of Litecoin’s network, a 2020 study by the Technical University of Munich put Litecoin’s rated power at 164 GW. In comparison, Dogecoin’s energy consumption is 157 GW, whereas Bitcoin’s is over 4 TW. However, according to the Digiconomist, Bitcoin is now drawing 130 TWh, whereas Dogecoin is drawing nearly 3 TWh. It can be assumed that Litecoin’s draw has also increased by a similar, if slightly lower, factor given its relative popularity.

Is Litecoin a Good Investment?

Litecoin is a tried-and-tested blockchain that has survived for well over a decade without too much controversy.

LTC’s economics (or tokenomics) are attractive to many, given its cap on maximum supply and transparent, coded deflationary model of issuance thanks to halving. With a supply of 84 million LTC, Litecoin is also reasonably scarce.

That said, proof-of-work cryptocurrencies have come under attack from many quarters thanks to their perceived overuse of electricity.

While Litecoin’s consumption is nowhere near that of Bitcoin, its PoW nature may see it lose attractiveness to environmentally-minded investors.

Litecoin’s longevity has seen it survive multiple cryptocurrency market cycles. However, when comparing 2021 highs to those of 2017, it should be noted that Litecoin underperformed other "blue chips" like BTC and ETH.

Finally, as the cryptocurrency industry matures and so do Litecoin’s competitors, Litecoin may find itself left behind. A block time of two and a half minutes can’t compare to some of the newer blockchains that confirm transactions in just a few seconds.