Litecoin (LTC)

General Data and Information. The Litecoin software was released on the 7th October 2011 by Charlie Lee, with the network going live roughly a week later on the 13th of October 2011. As a fork of Bitcoin Core, Litecoin featured several improvements upon the original Bitcoin protocol including reduced blocktimes (decreased to 2.5 minutes instead of 10 minutes), increased total supply and a different proof of work algorithm (scrypt vs SHA-256). The adoption of a faster blocktime meant that transactions were quicker to settle and be written into the blockchain, whilst the adoption of the memory intensive scrypt algorithm was intended to defeat the ASIC dominance of mining (due to the added financial costs of producing specialized mining machines with the required extra memory). However, due to the popularity of Litecoin, ASICs have been already developed and deployed that are able to mine the scrypt algorithm. Often considered to be the silver to Bitcoin’s gold status, improvements and upgrades are often rolled out to the Litecoin network before they reach the Bitcoin network (such as the SegWit and Lightning Network upgrades). This practice has also led to some people derisively calling Litecoin the test-network for Bitcoin. Milestones.

7th October 2011 - Open Source software for Litecoin released. 13th October 2011 - Litecoin network goes live. May 2017 - Segregated Witness (SegWit) implemented. First Lightning Network transaction completed on the Litecoin network. Utility. Litecoin serves a similar use-case function as Bitcoin, attempting to be a digital store of value and medium of exchange but with the advantage of faster block times (which makes transactions faster to settle). In addition (due to lower network usage), it has lower transaction fees than the better known flagship crypto-currency. However, it suffers from a smaller market capitalization and liquidity which makes it much less useful as a pairing partner for other crypto-currencies.

Significant Features. - Average Blocktime of 2.5 minutes; Total supply of 84 million LTC; Proof of Work consensus based on scrypt algorithm. - Transactions are pseduo-anonymous. Funds are sent address to address, but an owner identity can eventually attributed to an address given enough data and analysis. - Whilst sharing many decentralized attributes of consensus and governance as Bitcoin, Litecoin does have a known creator who can provide vision and guidance for the direction of the project. - Decentralized access allowing any party with the open-source software and internet access to send and receive Bitcoin irreversibly without third party interference or trust. - Decentralized governance via open-source development and forking. References: ..

The number of different cryptocurrencies launched after the birth of Bitcoin in 2009 has increased beyond what anyone could’ve envisaged. Each cryptocurrency that emerges claims that it offers something better in terms of scalability, speed, privacy or fees. One such cryptocurrency is Litecoin, which surfaced in 2011. Litecoin claims to be a better and lighter version of the original Bitcoin and has proved that its transactions are four times faster and much cheaper as well.
Litecoin was developed by a former Google employee. The technology offered by Bitcoin had some serious limitations and was discovered to be plagued by many flaws. Among these were slow speeds, low-scalability, and mining practicality problems. Litecoin was developed to address these issues and enhance the crypto-performance. Its goal is to be a storage value for digital contracts and to become a mainstream medium to be used for digital transactions. Its founder described the technology as ‘digital silver’ in relation to Bitcoin’s ‘digital gold’ (Litecoin, 2012).

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Litecoin was developed to address the issue of scalability and to reduce the expense of transactions of Bitcoin, and it has managed to provide a faster and cheaper alternative to some extent. The greater performance is achieved through a hashing algorithm known as Scrypt instead of using the original SHA-256 algorithm (Asolo, 2018).
Litecoin Foundation rolled a token swapping network by the name of Lightning in November 2017. It provided a way to swap tokens of different Blockchains, and the first swap to go down in history was between Bitcoin and Litecoin.

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The founder of Litecoin Is Charlie Lee, a former employee of Google. Litecoin’s code is very similar to the architecture of Bitcoin and can be considered as its forked (copied) version. Charlie Lee was very early to notice the limitations of Bitcoin and started working on Litecoin in 2011 (Litecoin-Foundation, 2014). A large portion of Litecoin tokens was held by the owner, Charlie Lee, who in 2018, tweeted that he has sold all his Litecoins. This news drastically dropped the market price of Litecoin, which has not been able to recover fully until now (Russell, 2017).

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The main highlight of Litecoin’s history is that it has remained one of the most popular altcoins of all time and has performed well in the crypto-market. Litecoin has maintained its place in the top 10 altcoins of all time for a really long time, which is a good indicator of its steady growth and stability.
Recently, Litecoin’s popularity took a serious hit after its founder announced that he has sold all of his Litecoins. Obviously, if the founder himself didn’t believe in the potential of the coin enough to keep it, why would others? This expression of no-confidence can be seen by the fact that there are more BTC-addresses with $1000 than LTC-addresses with as little as $1 (Bitinfocharts, 2019).
Another incident that made its way to the crypto-news on 24 Mar 2019, was that a user had to pay a staggering amount of 200 Litecoins as the fee for his transaction. Litecoin Foundation claims that the usual fee prices are around $0.05, but 200 Litecoins as fees are valued at over $17,500 (Wilfred, 2019).

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The code of Litecoin was being looked after by the Litecoin Foundation. However, the upgrades have come to a disappointing halt since February 2019 (Litecoin Team, 2019).

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There are no significant improvements in the technology and the current state does not offer something that could be considered a customer-attracting value. Litecoin might stay in the top ten cryptocurrencies for a while but as things are going, it would probably be left behind to perish.

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There are no active projects under Litecoin Foundation. Even, the last project that was announced and was being anticipated, was cancelled in March 2018.

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Litecoin can still cash on its popularity if it wishes to, but the time is of considerable importance. The potential is massive if the technology manages to build partnerships with businesses and attract a user to its network.

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Litecoin did not adapt to the changing dynamics of the crypto-world and thus has been relegated to the background by newer alternatives. It did not support the private transaction feature and did not work towards enhancing its network speed. Now there are much faster altcoins present in the market and other cryptocurrencies that offer much better solutions for scalability, privacy, and speed. The only hollow claim the Litecoin Foundation still holds is that it was once considered to be the ‘digital silver’ of the industry, a name people are not sure it can live up to at this point.

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Litecoin garnered much of its support from the cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase. Coinbase and Visa, collectively, launched the Coinbase Card which allowed users to use their Litecoin, Bitcoin and Ethereum balances for transactions (Zhao, 2019).

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Litecoin hosts one of the most supportive and loyal communities. They have toiled towards promoting technology in every way possible, but there have not been many incentives to create value and attract users towards the technology. The crypto world moved faster than they had imagined and so Litecoin’s development team did not get the chance to fully adapt to the market before other better options swooped in with their better features and promises.

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The Litecoin development is supported by the Litecoin Foundation. The current team consists mostly of members that are located in China and have ample experience in their relevant fields. The founder Charlie Lee acts as the Managing director of the Litecoin Foundation (Litecoin-Foundation, 2014).

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