Litecoin is an open source software or peer to peer cryptocurrency scheme released under MIT/X11 license. In technical details, Litecoin is almost similar to bitcoin, but with greater number of coins that can be mined. The transfer and creation of coins is centered on an open source cryptographic protocol. It is not managed by any central authority.
The Litecoin was released by an employee at Google and former Engineering Director at Coinbase in 7th October 2011 via an open source client on GitHub. On 13th October, the network of Litecoin went live. Initially it was fork of bitcoin core client having maximum number of coins to be mined, decreased block generation time, dissimilar hashing algorithm and considerably modified GUI. In May 2017, the Litecoin became the 1st amongst best five cryptocurrencies to approve Segregated Witness. At the end of same Month in May, Litecoin completed its Lightening Network transaction by transferring 0.00000001 Litecoin from Zurich to San Francisco in one second.
The Litecoin is identical to bitcoin but is different in some ways.
- The Litecoin network completed block in every 2.5 minutes, while bitcoin take 10 minutes
- It confirm transaction much faster than bitcoin
- The higher number of coins can be mined with Litecoin network as compare to Bitcoin
The Litecoin use scrypt algorithm such as ASIC and FPGA, that are more expensive and complicated to create mining for blockchain as compare to Bitcoin that uses SHA-256 algorithm.