What is Litecoin?
Litecoin (LTC) is a cryptocurrency and decentralized blockchain network with familiar goals. It provides a scalable and affordable alternative to Bitcoin (BTC), which suffers from slow transaction speeds and expensive gas fees. The popular altcoin was forked from Bitcoin’s open-source code base in 2011 by an ex-Google engineer, and uses the proof-of-work consensus mechanism secured by Scrypt mining software.
How Does Litecoin Work?
The Litecoin blockchain distinguishes itself from Bitcoin’s through its slightly different hashing algorithm, initially designed to discourage centralized, corporate mining businesses. Crypto miners leverage computing power to solve complex equations to create new blocks; as a reward they earn LTC through block rewards. Anything possible on Bitcoin is also possible on Litecoin, including digital assets like Ordinal NFTs and BRC-20 tokens under their own names.
The Litecoin Halving
Every 840,000 blocks or roughly 4 years, the number of coins rewarded per block are halved in what is known as the ‘halving event’ – reducing the rate at which new coins enter circulation while keeping the supply cap intact. This helps ensure that inflation remains low while incentivizing miners to keep mining even when rewards shrink over time.
MimbleWimble
In 2021, Litecoin became one of the first major cryptocurrencies to launch support for MimbleWimble extension blocks (MWEB). MWEB helps increase privacy by allowing users to obfuscate transaction information such as amounts sent or received during transactions. This makes it harder for outside observers like governments or banks to track down user activity on the network.
Litecoin History
In October 2011 Charlie Lee created Litecoin after studying Bitcoin’s whitepaper more than two years prior – making him one of crypto’s earliest pioneers. Since then he has gone on become an outspoken advocate for cryptocurrency adoption – creating awareness around issues related to financial freedom and innovation within distributed ledger technology amongst other topics. In 2017 Litecoin adopted SegWit technology in order to reduce transaction costs further and make scaling easier – helping them stay competitive against other payment networks such as Visa or MasterCard who have been working hard on their own solutions too .