Litecoin:- Explained Briefly

Hey readers!
Today I decided to blog about Litecoin,which is also a cryptocurrency and similar to bitcoin.
So here is my study on it.

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. While inspired by, and in most regards technically nearly identical to Bitcoin (BTC), Litecoin has some technical improvements over Bitcoin, and most other major cryptocurrencies, such as the adoption of Segregated Witness, and the Lightning Network.These effectively allow a greater amount of transactions to be processed by the network in a given time, reducing potential bottlenecks, as seen with Bitcoin.Litecoin also has almost zero payment cost and facilitates payments approximately four times faster than Bitcoin.

Litecoin was released via an open-source client on GitHub on October 7, 2011 by Charlie Lee, a former Google employee. It was a fork of the Bitcoin Core client, differing primarily by having a decreased block generation time (2.5 minutes), increased maximum number of coins, different hashing algorithm, and a slightly modified GUI.

Litecoin reached a $1 billion marketcap in November 2013.As of May 9, 2017, its market capitalization is US$1,542,657,077 at around $30 per coin.

In May 2017, Litecoin became the first of the top-5 (by market cap) cryptocurrencies to adopt Segregated Witness.

In April 2014, a new version of Litecoin was released, version 0.8.7.1, which fixed some minor issues along with an important fix related to the Heartbleed security bug.

Differences from Bitcoin

The Litecoin Network aims to process a block every 2.5 minutes, rather than Bitcoin's 10 minutes, which its developers claim allows for faster transaction confirmation. A drawback is a higher probability of orphaned blocks. Advantages can include greater resistance to a double spending attack over the same period as Bitcoin.

Litecoin uses scrypt in its proof-of-work algorithm, a sequential memory-hard function requiring asymptotically more memory than an algorithm which is not memory-hard.

The Litecoin Network will produce 84 million Litecoins, or four times as many currency units as will be issued by the Bitcoin Network.

Due to Litecoin's use of the scrypt algorithm, FPGA and ASIC devices made for mining Litecoin are more complicated to create and more expensive to produce than they are for Bitcoin, which uses SHA-256.[16] This is widely due to the Scrypt hashing scheme being more memory intensive; increasing memory requirements for ASICs and FPGAs.

For more info-:

References-:
https://litecoin.org
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Litecoin