Litecoin (LTC)

Litecoin

Total supply	84,000,000 LTC

Basics

• Created in october 2011, second altcoin after Namecoin. Has some small tweaks, but is basically Bitcoin with faster block times. Was promoted as the Silver to Bitcoin's Gold.
• Litecoin blockchain, hard forked from Bitcoin on October 2011, using PoW.
• Short explanation: Faster Bitcoin.
• Longer explanation:

Litecoin is often thought of as the silver to Bitcoin’s gold. It has a similar function, but is focused more on small, frequent transactions than as a store of value like Bitcoin.

Transactions on the Litecoin network have lower fees are confirmed 4x faster.

History

• "It was founded by Google employee Charlie Lee on October 7, 2011. Incredibly, Litecoin made a 100% leap within 24 hours and it peaked at a $1 billion market cap later in November 2013."

Audits & Exploits

• Bug bounty program can be found [insert here].

Bugs/Exploits

• Halborn discovered a DoS and an authenticated remote code execution vulnerabilities in node software on a number of UTXO chains including Litecoin, ZCash, Doge, and others (3-2023).
• 51% Attack warning: “Litecoin’s hashrate has fallen more than 50% from its peak,” claimed anonymous developer imaginary_username, “and there is no other major Scrypt coin to put those dark ASICs to use (Scrypt is an algorithm for mining Litecoin, its main significance is that it’s different from bitcoin (all notable forks); so machines used to mine bitcoin cannot be used to mine Litecoin and vice versa. This means that lost hash power has nowhere to go). It is likely more vulnerable to 51% attacks than any SHA-256 coins.”

Token

Launch

• No Premine or Presale

Utility

• Utility coin.

Coin Distribution

• From Coin Metrics #38 (18-2-2020):

"Litecoin (LTC) had several large dips in the amount held by large addresses (at least 1/1K of total supply) throughout 2013 just prior to the December 2013 price spike, and throughout 2017 before the January 2018 price peak. Interestingly, nearly 46% of supply is still held in large LTC account compared to 11% held in large Bitcoin accounts."

• From a twitter thread by Adam Cochran (29-4-2020): In Litecoin 300 addresses hold 54.3% of LTC

Technology

• Whitepaper can be found [insert here].
• Code can be viewed [insert here].
• Programming language used:

Transaction Details

• Capacity (TPS):
• Latency:

How it works

• It was the first successful cryptocurrency to use scrypt as its hash function instead of SHA-256

Mining

Doge Merge Mining

• From Our Network (29-5-2021):

"DOGE has historically made up 10% of all LTC merge mining revenue. Litecoin miners are seeing 5x increase in daily revenue (80% from DOGE income). Opportunistic LTC miners have driven up Dogecoin’s hashrate by 48% YTD (30D) with the merge-mined coin now having a higher market cap than its base coin."

Privacy Method

• From The Block (8-6-2022):

"On May 20, Litecoin developers activated a privacy-preserving protocol on the coin, called MimbleWimble Extension Blocks (MWEB). This MimbleWimble update will allow Litecoin to conceal transactional data yet maintain its ability to process a lot of transactions quickly."

• From CoinDesk (14-10-2020):

"Litecoin is relying on a technology called mimblewimble, which reduces the amount of data that’s publicly visible on the main blockchain network, through the use of “extension blocks” that help to hide inputs and outputs."

Compliance

• From The Block (8-6-2022):

"On May 20, Litecoin was upgraded to add privacy features. Due to Korean AML laws, this has resulted in the token being removed from major Korean crypto exchanges."

• From CoinDesk (14-10-2020):

"The new privacy features are designed to operate in accordance with cryptocurrency exchanges’ increasingly stringent compliance with global regulators."

Roadmap

• Can be found [Insert link here].

Usage

• Reached its highest amount of tx from May 3, 2023 after rolling out the LTC-20, a fork of the BRC-20 token. Similar things happened on Dogecoin after it forked Ordinals to create Dordinals.

Projects that use or built on it

• Flare Network; will launch (7-1-2021) on it later in the year of 2021.

Competition

• Bitcoin and other PoW chains.

Pros and Cons

Cons

• Since Litecoin runs on a very similar blockchain to Bitcoin, it will eventually have similar scaling issues once the network grows to a certain size. However, the development community is trying to prepare for this by implementing scaling solutions early, such as Lightning Network.
• Basically has no innovation (21-6-2019) at all.
• The situation of Litecoin, anno 2019 was clearly explained in this interview with anonymous developer imaginary_username by Coinspice (3-11-2019):

"Given that Litecoin only has to spend minimally on development, they follow literally all BTC developments after all, it makes sense for whales to throw money exclusively at marketing.

Also, since they have both liquidity – being an old coin helps – and non-hostility from most BTC maximalists, they do have an advantage in that some BTC hodlers will do their marketing for them. The hodlers are pretty decent in number, so that helps quite a bit.

And what are you to make of the rumored lack of development on Litecoin? Is there something to that or do you think it’s blown out of proportion?

Litecoin can continue indefinitely being a ‘4x bitcoin,’ so I don’t see why they have any urgency in developing anything new that’s not on the BTC roadmap. If I were them, I’d drop any pretense of new things, which, if realized, are actually dangerous for their situation.

The only external threat to their existence would be either BTC increases blocksize one way or another, which fortunately for them is not happening; or a surge in BCH popularity, which has been bludgeoned by the market and hence probably not high on their threat list.

‘Lack of unique features’ is very unlikely to be a worry, while ‘deviated from BTC and couldn’t keep up with maintenance, and fall apart in weird ways’ is a very real threat."

Team, Funding, Partners

Team

• Full team can be found [here].
• Lee, Charlie, founder

Funding

• From CoinSpice (9-2-2020):

"Charlie Lee, the founder and creator of Litecoin, announced Litecoin Pool offers now the possibility of donating any percentage of mining rewards to the Litecoin Foundation to support the development of the currency. Litecoin Pool is a Litecoin-only mining pool with more than 5,000 users contributing with 27,210 GHs to the network. This is a clear move that seeks to emulate the BCH mining development fund discussion for the Litecoin cause, but making it voluntary and letting miners decide which percentage of their rewards are allocated toward the Litecoin Foundation."

• “The founder sold most of his coins and he lost the incentive to work on the project and has left the coin without a captain.”
• Is one of the investments chosen by Grayscale, owned by DCG (Grayscale also owns 1% of the BTC supply)

 (:

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