In two weeks a bifurcation will occur in Litecoin from which will be derived a new blockchain called Litecoin Cash (LCC), which will replace the Scrypt mining algorithm used by Litecoin, by SHA-256 (the one used by Bitcoin) and multiply by 10 the reward per block mined in the chain. However, the reasons for this fact do not seem to be very clear.
The announcement of this bifurcation was made through the Twitter account @LitecoinFork, on January 26, with a brief intrigue campaign in which they present the bifurcation (hardfork) in Litecoin as an alternative for those who are "tired" of the bifurcations in Bitcoin:
Among the details of this fork presented on Twitter, as well as on the website litecoinca.sh and through a group on Telegram, it was reported that the bifurcation will occur in block 1,371,111, estimated for February 19 of this year, with a 10: 1 ratio with respect to Litecoin. In other words, those who own Litecoins at that time in a local wallet or in an exchange house compatible with LCC, can get 10 LCC for each LTC.
The maximum of the LCCs generated will also be 10 times the maximum LTC, that is, 840 million LCC. The same factor affects the reward per mine block, which will be equal to 250 LCC per block. The change that attracts the most attention is related to the algorithm used in mining: LTC uses Scrypt, while LCC will use SHA-256, the same one that uses the Bitcoin network (of which Litecoin branched off, ironically).
TALKING TO THE UNICORN OF LITECOIN CASH
In CriptoNoticias we had the opportunity to ask several questions to Roger the Unicorn, as identified by the public relations manager of LCC. For starters, we asked Roger if there was another reason for this bifurcation beyond that there are "many bitcoin forks" as inferred from his first tweet.
In his response, the LCC representative said that "the community is very dispersed against Bitcoin Cash, Bitcoin Diamond or Super Bitcoin. But nobody has experimented so far with Litecoin. " To which he added that many of his friends have old bitcoin ASIC devices (SHA-256 algorithm) that they want to bring to life again with the addition of Litecoin properties.
After the intrigue created by this response, we asked Roger if the existence of old ASIC equipment justifies the bifurcation. To this concern the "Unicorn" replied: "It is an experiment. See if a Litecoin SHA-256 will work. It may or may not, as with all concepts of cryptocurrencies in general. "
Another feature of this proposed bifurcation is that the mining time for each block is maintained in 2.5 minutes and the same Dash algorithm, DarkGravity V3, is used to recalculate the mining difficulty after each block.
The beginning of the bifurcation is slow, so the rewards will grow from 1.25 LCC to 250 LCC gradually in the first 400 blocks after the start. It is also known that there will be a pre-mine under 1% of the total coins at the time of separation, approximately 5.5 million LCC, which will be paid to a development fund.
THE FATHER SPEAKS
Litecoin comes from a Bitcoin fork that occurred on January 13, 2011, led by Charlie Lee; who decided to take the maximum number of emitted cryptocurrencies from 21 million to 24 million, use Scrypt instead of SHA-256 as a mining algorithm and lower the frequency of block generation to 2.5 minutes. In May 2017, Litecoin was the first cryptocurrency among the top 5 of CoinMarketCap to implement Segregated Witness (SegWit), the same month in which the first Lightning Network transaction was completed through Litecoin.
Lee's reaction to the announcement of the Litecoin Cash fork on Twitter was very direct: "Litecoin's team and I are not bifurcating Litecoin. Any bifurcation of which they have news is a scam that tries to confuse them so that they think that it has relation with Litecoin. Do not fall into that trap and above all do not provide your private key or seed on your website. Be careful!"