What is Litecoin?
Litecoin is a global digital currency based on the blockchain, a technology that powers similar currencies such as the Bitcoin. It was created as an improvement of Bitcoin in certain ways such as the speed of processing transactions which about four times faster with extremely low transaction fees and as such can be said to be a fork off Bitcoin. Litecoin is also open source and its source code is available under MIT/X11 license number.
The total number of Litecoins in its finite coinage is 4X the number of total available Bitcoins. The Scrypt algorithm that Litecoin utilizes also needs less processing power and is churned out every 2.5 minutes using the same Proof-of-Work protocol. There is also greater decentralization of the mining operation but to compensate for the less power needed, more processing memory is needed.
Founder: Charlie Lee
Release Date: October 13. 2011