What if there was something like Bitcoin, but it was faster, cheaper, and could handle more transactions per second?
Litecoin is meant to be a sound money that people use for everyday payments, while Bitcoin is meant to be a long-term store of value.
Before talking technicals lets get to know about its fouder, Charlie Lee.
Source ( https://images.app.goo.gl/G48fhZzDBmyUpjCP8)
Charlie Lee was a professional poker player.He understanding the technicals of a poker and having some study knowledge got himself a job on Google as a software engineer. Later on, he would become an engineering manager, and then engineering director of Coinbase from 2015 to 2017, so he has a notable background.
He created Litecoin to be a faster, cheaper, and more decentralized version of Bitcoin. Now lets look over how Litecoin actually achieves this faster speed, cheaper transactions and better decentralization :
- Bitcoin has a block time of 10 minutes, meaning all the transactions are collected and grouped together and then put into a block in 10 minutes. The next block has to wait 10 minutes until it is added to the blockchain.
Litecoin cuts this down to 2 and a half minutes, making it faster.
- Another area where Litecoin shines is how many transactions per second the network can handle.
Bitcoin can do around 5 transactions a second, roughly costing around $2 per transaction, but sometimes going up to 10.
Litecoin improved them by making some easy improvements and can actually process 54 transactions per second and the cost of each transaction is down to a penny or two
Open-Source Project
Litecoin is open source, just like Bitcon, and open-source means that anyone can look at the code that runs the network and even make suggestions if they want. If the suggestion is good enough, and more than half of all the miners approve it, the code suggestion will be accepted.
Lightning Network
Litecoin the first network to adopt the Lightning Network.is
The Lightning network is a layer 2 solution that allows users to make transactions in seconds, almost for free, and making payments much simpler.
SHA 256 vs Scrypt Hashing Algorithm
One of the largest changes to Litecoin is the hashing algorithm it uses. The hashing algorithm is actually the “problem” that the computer is trying to solve when they mine blocks. Oh, by the way, Litecoin is a proof-of-work cryptocurrency which means miners use their computing power to work really hard to guess the solution for the next block. Anyways, when Litecoin was created, miners on the Bitcoin network realized they could create special hardware to mine Bitcoins much faster.
This hardware gave them an advantage because the hardware, called an ASIC was very expensive and was much more efficient than a personal computer. Charlie Lee wanted to use a new hashing algorithm that evened the playing field again so that miners could competitively use their personal computers again to participate and add blocks to the network. He decided on the Scrypt Hashing Algorithm. This meant that the blockchain was technically more decentralized, letting ordinary people with any old computer join the network and attempt to win some Litecoin as a reward for mining.
This was a short story and introduction about Litecoin.