A celebration is due for Litecoin with 100% uptime over its 11 years in existence. Which is even better than Bitcoin. Actually, better than any other crypto network in the world to be exact.
Litecoin was released via an open-source client on Oct. 7, 2011. The Litecoin network officially went live on Oct. 13, 2011. Litecoin was launched a couple of years after Bitcoin. Since then has continued to grow in network adoption and in general adoption worldwide. Most recently Google announced that it would start accepting payments in Litecoin. This is quite interesting as Charlie Lee the creator of Litecoin worked at Google 11 years ago. Some things are just meant to be.
How Litecoin and Bitcoin Differ
The primary differences between Litecoin and Bitcoin are a four times faster block time, an increased maximum supply, and the use of the Scrypt hashing algorithm instead of the SHA-256 hashing algorithm.
Litecoin aims to process a block every 2.5 minutes, instead of every 10 minutes which makes it 4x faster. Litecoin also has Dogecoin as an auxiliary proof of work mined network. Meaning Litecoin miners can also mine for dogecoin at the same time.
In addition, unlike Bitcoin, the creator doesn't own a large stake. It is estimated that Satoshi Nakamoto holds over 1M bitcoin out of the 21M. This would be equivalent to Charlie Lee holding 4M litecoin, instead, Charlie Lee has no major stake except the continued time and energy he spends working on Litecoin development and adoption.
Litecoin miners are rewarded with 12.5 new Litecoins per block, which halves every 840,000 blocks or roughly four years. There are currently 71 million LTC in circulation and a maximum cap of 84 million coins. Litecoin's next block reward halving occurs next year. Driving the current new supply down to around 1.8% annual inflation. litecoinhalving.com
Litecoin also offers the lowest fees to transact on the network, this is due to a perfect size blockchain and scaling features such as SegWit and MWEB. Litecoin has the ability to do 10s of Millions of transactions per day and has lots of capacity for future growth. Not to mention second-layer scaling such as Lightning.
Litecoin and Bitcoin Development
The great thing about Litecoin is that it shares the same codebase as Bitcoin and continues to be in lock-step with all Bitcoin development. This allows for both Litecoin proposals to get implemented on Bitcoin and all Bitcoin proposals to get implemented on Litecoin. More recently after the Taproot implementation on Bitcoin, Litecoin developers were easily able to add this to Litecoin. The same goes now for MWEB on Litecoin, with its latest upgrade eventually this technology could be added to Bitcoin.
Litecoin and MWEB
In May 2022, Litecoin adopted the Mimble Wimble Extension Block (MWEB) protocol. Which is also 5 years to the month after upgrading SegWit in 2017. Which as we know was added to Litecoin first and then adopted to Bitcoin later. Could MWEB be next for Bitcoin?
This new technological breakthrough does a couple of things really well. It allows for private transactions, fungibility, and scalability. Currently, litecoin sent on the mainchain shows how much litecoin is sent in each transaction, it also shows how much litecoin is in each wallet. Bitcoin has the same issue today. However, with MWEB, litecoin sent using this feature the amounts and wallets are protected. Only the sender and receiver can see how much is being sent.
Furthermore, these networks are all limited in block size to maintain decentralization. Litecoin MWEB offers the ability to compress the blockchain increasing the number of transactions per data stored.
Lastly, fungibility is improved with MWEB, since litecoin using this feature can't be labeled or tagged differently. This makes them easily interchangeable like cash is today. Fungibility is the biggest issue facing Bitcoin and Litecoin seems to have the best solution for this.
Litecoin Summit
Next week, the Litecoin Foundation is hosting the Litecoin Summit in Las Vegas on October 21-22nd at the LINQ hotel. This will be a great event for litecoin supporters to come together and celebrate all of their accomplishments over the years. Along with discussing future growth and opportunities for Litecoin.
Happy Birthday 11th Birthday, Litecoin!
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