🔸What is Litecoin?
Litecoin was created in 2011 by developer and former Google employee Charlie Lee and is often referred to as silver compared to Bitcoin, which is called gold. This is largely due to the fact that it uses most of the bitcoin codebase.
However, Litecoin has many advantages over Bitcoin, including faster transaction speeds. The consensus protocol known as scrypt is also considered fairer and more secure than the Proof-of-Work SHA-256 miners used in Bitcoin. One of the main features of Scrypt is that it is very memory intensive. This means that mining in pools is much more difficult as tasks cannot be loaded asynchronously. This makes it much more difficult to carry out a 51% attack on the network.
🔸Litecoin Mission
Described in the era of “money for the Internet”, Litecoin was developed with a very specific mission – to be a peer-to-peer Internet currency. It provides instant, near-zero payments worldwide. It was also created to support Bitcoin’s goal of meeting the world’s ever-growing and complex payment needs.
For a while, the network has been plagued by bugs that have been a huge obstacle to progress and have affected the trust of the Litecoin community.
That all changed in November 2013 when Litecoin 0.8.5.1 was released. All known problems were eliminated and the popularity of Litecoin began to grow rapidly. The digital asset LTC reached a market capitalization of $ 1 billion by 2013. Just two years after the official launch.
🔸Litecoin growth
Its rise in popularity has been driven by many factors. First, mining can take place on a simple computer without the need for expensive mining rigs. Secondly, more coins were produced compared to other cryptocurrencies. And thirdly, people liked the flexibility of the Litecoin team, who adapted the code and experimented frequently to make the necessary improvements.
Litecoin remained in the spotlight, with LTC ranking second and third in terms of market capitalization for a long time. In May 2017, LTC adopted the Segregated Witness protocol, continuing the bitcoin update process. As a result, prices for LTC rose from $ 3 to $ 300. Litecoin hit an all-time high of $ 360.66 on December 18, 2017.
What’s really cool about the L Lighting Network update is that it made atomic swaps between blockchains easier. Essentially, it allowed users to exchange their cryptocurrencies without the need for an exchange. The first Litecoin / Bitcoin atomic swap was carried out on September 22, 2017 by Charlie Lee himself.
🔸Litecoin controversy
In 2017, amid the peak value, Charlie Lee made the controversial move by selling all of his Litecoins. This caused a lot of hate from the crypto community because it made him look like he had lost faith in his creation. Charlie explained this by the fact that he did not want to be financially involved in the ecosystem he was working on. And that the lack of coins helps him not to influence his decisions about which direction to go. In addition, he warned everyone about an impending multi-year bear market.
🔸What next?
Getting rid of his coins allowed Charlie Lee to become truly independent, and he still participates in the Litecoin ecosystem. In 2018, the Litecoin Foundation acquired 9.9% of the shares of the German WEG Bank AG, and now, thanks to this partnership, they are developing new products based on Litecoin. In May 2020, the Litecoin Foundation partnered with legendary Atari to explore new ways to connect cryptocurrencies and games.
More interesting information about crypto are here.
Reviews: