Litecoin (LTC) is one of the earliest and most established cryptocurrencies, created in October 2011 by former Google engineer Charlie Lee as a “lighter” version of Bitcoin. Often described as the silver to Bitcoin’s gold, Litecoin was designed to process transactions faster and more cheaply than Bitcoin while maintaining a similar decentralised structure.
Key technical differences from Bitcoin include: Block time of 2.5 minutes (vs. Bitcoin’s 10 minutes), allowing 4x faster confirmations; Maximum supply of 84 million LTC (vs. Bitcoin’s 21 million); and a Scrypt hashing algorithm (vs. Bitcoin’s SHA-256), originally intended to make mining more accessible to ordinary hardware, though specialised ASIC miners now dominate.
Litecoin is consistently one of the most widely accepted cryptocurrencies for payments, supported by thousands of merchants globally and most major exchanges. It has also been a testing ground for Bitcoin improvements — Segregated Witness (SegWit) and the Lightning Network were both deployed on Litecoin before Bitcoin. Litecoin undergoes a halving every 840,000 blocks (approximately every 4 years), reducing miner rewards by 50%.
Example: Sending $200 worth of Litecoin between wallets costs approximately $0.01 in fees and confirms within 2.5 minutes — compared to Bitcoin, which might cost $2–5 and take 10–60 minutes during congestion.
Learn more: Litecoin.org — Official Site
