A really simple guide to Litecoin

What is Litecoin?

It’s the little brother to Bitcoin’s big brother. Litecoin is a peer-to-peer cryptocurrency, just like ‘BITCOIN’. However, it was designed to be quicker at processing transactions than Bitcoin, hence the term ‘lite’!

Who Invented Litecoin?

An ex-Google employee called Charlie Lee. He was a big fan of Bitcoin, but thought he could do make a better version, so he built Litecoin!

A brief history

• 📡Charlie Lee released the software Litecoin is built on to a coding community on October 7, 2011.
• ⚡Two days later, Litecoin went live.
• 💸By November 2013, Litecoin was worth $1 billion.
• 🗺️Today it’s considered one of the biggest currencies in the crypto world.

What’s so special about it?

In addition to the benefits of blockchain:

• 🚷Decentralised — no-one person or group owns or controls it
• 👯Trustless (peer-to-peer) — No more third parties
• ↔️Borderless — no need for exchanges to move currency across borders
• Immutability — It can never be changed or reversed unlike all of today’s financial systems
• 🙅‍♂️Double-spending — it solved the problem many digital currencies had tried to crack
• 🔬 It’s a proof-of-concept for BLOCKCHAIN a technology that will change literally everything.

On top of all that, Litecoin’s features make it:

• 💨Super speedy. With Bitcoin, the average amount of time it takes to create a block in the blockchain is 10 minutes. With Litecoin it takes just 2.5 minutes.
• ☕Designed for every day — it was designed for small transactions, like buying coffee and, thanks to its faster processing speeds.
• ⛏️It uses a slightly different mining method to producing currency than Bitcoin.

How is Litecoin produced?

Litecoin is mined in much the same way as Bitcoin.

‘FIND OUT MORE ABOUT MINING HERE’

Miners are trying to solve a very difficult puzzle, which in doing so, creates bundles of transactions or blocks on the blockchain. A miner is rewarded when they solve the puzzle.

The difference is the algorithm Litecoin asks its miners to use.

The algorithm used to mine Bitcoin allows miners to join forces — leading to the creation of mining pools. Litecoin’s algorithm, however, makes that more difficult.

That means it’s easier for regular people to earn money from mining Litecoin.

Want to know more?

This is just the tip of the crypto iceberg. LitePaper has a whole host of easy-to-understand articles that make learning about cryptocurrencies, blockchain and DLT technology really bloody simple.

Click here to learn more.