Litecoin is a cryptocurrency, which was created in 2011 as a lightweight alternative to Bitcoin; the two key differences between them are: - Litecoin's smaller time intervals between adding new blocks to its Blockchain, which is supposed to decrease transaction times; - Litecoin's mining is governed by the Scrypt algorithm, as opposed to Bitcoin's SHA 256. The purpose of this is to restrict ASIC miners and allow users to efficiently mine Litecoin on regular PC's; it was working as intended for some time until Scrypt ASICs were developed. Since its creation, Litecoin has been very popular, with an almost constant presence in the top 5 of cryptocurrencies by market capitalization (albeit never beating Bitcoin in that regard).