Litecoin

Litecoin was released on October 7, 2011, via an open-source client on GitHub, under MIT/X11 lісеnѕеѕ which are permissive forms of open software licenses with limited restrictions on reuse. The Litecoin Network went live on October 13, 2011, and is described as a fork of the Bitcoin Core client. In addition to trading and purchasing Litecoin, it is possible to mine it, which essentially means providing the network with computational power in exchange for the digital currency. As of 2018, miners were awarded 25 new Litecoins per block, an amount which will get halved roughly every 4 years (every 840,000 blocks).

In May 2017, Litecoin became the first of the top 5 (by market cap) cryptocurrencies to adopt Segregated Witness (known as SegWit), which is a soft fork allowing optimal data transmission while bypassing certain protocol restrictions. This (amongst other things) not only speeds up transactions but allows for larger block sizes.

The currency was created by Charlie Lee, a former Google employee and Engineering Director at Coinbase. Litecoin is his second attempt at a cryptocurrency, having launched one called Fairbrix which didn’t get off the ground due to technical problems. In 2017 Charlie sold or donated all of his Litecoins except for a few he kept as collectibles. He took the decision not to hold a significant amount of the tokens to avoid a conflict of interest.

The Litecoin blockchain is the largest global scrypt based network, operating with 100% uptime since 2011 securing and transacting billions of dollars of value. Scrypt is an algorithm specifically designed to make it costly to perform large-scale custom hardware attacks by requiring large amounts of memory.

Litecoin was created to make mining as accessible and democratized as possible, rather than being monopolized by companies with huge mining capabilities. Since the time between mining blocks is small, more miners have the opportunity to mine blocks and earn mining rewards. At the beginning of 2018, 14,400 Litecoins were being mined a day, the maximum number possible.