25 Litecoin Facts: What Is Litecoin Today in 2024

25-litecoin-facts
Table Of Contents
  1. About Litecoin
  2. 25 Facts About Litecoin
  3. Who created Litecoin?
  4. Who controls Litecoin?
  5. How does Litecoin work?
  6. The Interesting Facts About Litecoin
  7. The Sources

Nowadays, the world is rushing towards digitalization. It is not only about communication and retail – even the money becomes virtual. Since the introduction of the first cryptocurrency in the 2000-s, the financial market has experienced drastic changes. Starting as an only ambitious project, digital currency is not becoming more and more valuable on the market. There are a lot of crypto assets these days, and one of the most popular and promising is Litecoin. Let’s discover everything or even a little more about this currency, including litecoin facts and myths.

About Litecoin

So what is Litecoin, and how can it be useful? Basically, it is one of the crypto coins: in 2020, there are hundreds of them, but Litecoin has managed to become one of the few that are developing steadily, increasing in price, and being able to stand up to the competition with BTC. It also has one of the greatest capitalizations of all the cryptocurrencies. Litecoin definition is usually presented as a peer-to-peer decentralized payment system that also uses the cryptocurrency with the same name. Litecoin operates on blockchain and is open-source software.

25 Facts About Litecoin

Investigating every detail worth attention, we have managed to group all the information in 25 litecoin facts. Stay tuned to learn the complete list of litecoin facts! Keep a watchful eye on the infographic below, not to miss the most significant data.

Who created Litecoin?

  1. Litecoin is a Fork of Bitcoin
    You have probably heard about Bitcoin – the first, and the most influential cryptocurrency which is worldwide famous now. A crave of all the financial investors, Bitcoin had several forks. In software development, a fork is a project which is made using a copy of source code from one software package to create an independent one. One of Bitcoin’s forks has led to the creation of Litecoin, which uses the same protocol as BTC.
  2. When LTC was created
    As it has already been said, the cryptocurrency, inspired by the Bitcoin, used its protocol. As a result, 2011-10-04 at 21:10:58 UTC through Google’s domain service, the new coin was developed. On October 7th, 2011, Litecoin was firstly released for purchase on the open-source client on GitHub.
  3. Name Etymology
    Digital currency often has interesting name origins. Some are even named after popular memes. It is relatively easy to discover the meaning of the name of this crypto: “Lite” – light, and “coin” as it is a currency. The abbreviation of this digital currency is simply LTC, and the symbol Ł is also used frequently.
  4. Who made litecoin?
    The coin was developed by Mr. Charlie Lee, the computer scientist, and former Google employee. He was the one responsible for the Chrome OS code. In 2011, Mr. Lee gave a start to a new project as he got interested in BTC, while still working for Google. Using the code of the Bitcoin, LTC was developed. In July 2013, he began working at Coinbase and Litecoin was officially adopted by the cryptocurrency exchange.

Who controls Litecoin?

  1. Who owns litecoin?
    The crypto is owned by Litecoin Foundation, led by Mr. Lee. It is an international non-profit organization registered in Singapore. The main aim of the company is to advance Litecoin “for the good of society by developing and promoting state-of-the-art blockchain technologies”.
  2. What about direct control?
    Usually, all the money was controlled by the government, and it was the only institution issued to provide people with the currency. Things work differently with LTC – it is a decentralized payment method. It means that it can be controlled directly neither by the Litecoin Foundation nor any government. Just like other cryptos, Ł is an independent digital currency.

How does Litecoin work?

  1. How to use LTC?
    It is a digital currency, which means it was created to ease the struggle with payments on the web. It operates similarly to any other fiat currency, but it has no physical banknotes so that you can send payments from one person to another only on the Internet. To manage your transactions, you need a specific e-wallet. You can also buy and sell Litecoins for fiat currencies or other cryptos using cryptocurrency exchanges or OTC markets.
  2. Investing in litecoin
    Another way to use LTC is to invest in it. Considering this opportunity, the one buys a certain amount of the coin and keeps it in their e-wallet. As all the cryptos increase in price in a long-term perspective, it is a great idea to store the assets exactly in digital currency. To make it more reliable, it is recommended to use the ones with the greater capitalization. Investing in litecoin, you will profit very soon, especially if you decide to trade with your crypto assets.
  3. Does LTC use blockchain?
    We are 99% sure that everybody who has ever heard about cryptocurrency at least once, have also come across the term “blockchain”. It is the technology that most cryptocurrencies use. In a nutshell, blockchain is the sequence of “blocks” – pieces of digital information. These blocks include the information about the transactions – their amount, date, persons participating in the payment, etc. Each another block is linked with the previous one, so that one block cannot be changed without affecting all the chain. This makes blockchain a relatively safe technology. Almost all the cryptos are based on it, including Litecoin.
  4. Litecoin Mining
    New Litecoins occur regularly through mining. This process is simply a record-keeping service similar to all the cryptocurrencies. Litecoin blocks are relatively difficult to produce. Thus, miners have to make a cryptographic hash of all the block that meets certain criteria, and the only way to find a suitable one is to compute many of them until you find the one that fits.
  5. Rewards for Miners
    Litecoin offers rewards to each who mines a block. At the start, the reward was 50 LTC for a block. Every 840,000 blocks the reward is halved – but this process is time-consuming and takes years. The coin halved in August 2019 – since that time, the miners have been rewarded with 12,5 LTC for the block.
  6. Its cryptographic algorithm is suitable for the beginners
    Even though the process of mining is tough, it still doesn’t create such competition as Bitcoin mining does. A lot of miners could not start or continue to work with BTC because their CPUs couldn’t compete with ASICs. As a result, they have changed their priorities and have started mining LTC as Scrypt is more accessible for mining newbies.

The Interesting Facts About Litecoin

  1. Litecoin gambling
    The popular digital currencies are widely used in gambling industry nowadays. One of them is Litecoin. As gaming is prohibited or restricted in many countries, it becomes more and more difficult for them to operate with the fiat currencies. The introduction of the crypto coins became an innovation for the industry. Litecoin, like other cryptos, is decentralized, so that its transactions are anonymous and cannot be tracked by the authorities. Plus, it is a coin with high capitalization, which makes it a reliable method of payment. Therefore, you can find numerous Litecoin casinos that offer the best gambling options for crypto.
  2. The digital currency was released to the public when there were only 150 coins mined.
  3. LTC has 4 times more volume than BTC
    The volume of cryptocurrencies is limited by their algorithm. Thus, the fewer coins are available, the more pricey the digital currency becomes. The amount of Bitcoins is limited to only 21 million, while the amount of LTC will be as high as 84 million coins.
  4. Max & Min Price
    The historical maximum price of Litecoin is $375.29 per one coin, while the historical minimum price is only $1.11.
  5. LTC works on a P2P basis
    Any crypto coin which uses the blockchain operates on the peer to peer (P2P) basis or network. The peer to peer network allows people who share the same system to communicate through the web. There is no central server, so that all the users have the same opportunities.
  6. Safe prot
    Each and every digital currency uses its own protocol to make the network safer and more effective. For example, BTC uses SHA 256, and Ripple has the infamous Ripple protocol. As Litecoin is a fork, its developers managed to improve its protocol – it is known as “hashing protocol” and it makes the transactions super safe and anonymous. This algorithm utilizes the Proof-of-work concept as well.
  7. LTC is written on C++ programming language.
  8. Bitcoin vs. litecoin
    Many crypto experts consider Litecoin to be a younger “brother” of Bitcoin, and this statement turns out to be true. These guys are often compared. Created from the same core, with the use of the same protocol, BTC and LTC can be used in the same way and serve to achieve the same purposes. However, LTC is an improved version of Bitcoin – with a faster speed of transactions and advanced algorithms. However, Bitcoin was first, which has resulted in its dominance and greater popularity among all the other digital currencies.
  9. 4 times faster than Bitcoin
    Creating LTC, Mr. Lee and other developers paid much attention to note the drawbacks of BTC and avoid them in the new coin. One of the critical aspects was transaction speed. While the Bitcoin transaction will take you around 10 minutes, LTC has a fixed speed of just 2,5 minutes.
  10. Litecoin is one of the most successful crypto projects
    The success of a digital currency can be measured with market capitalization. According to the latest ratings, LTC is included in top-10 cryptocurrencies in the world. Nowadays, its ranking is at the seventh position after Bitcoin, Ethereum, XRP, Tether, Bitcoin Cash, and Bitcoin SV. The current market capitalization of the coin is $3 037 488 502.
  11. The Altcoin
    Bitcoin was the first cryptocurrency, and all the other similar coins launched after its success are called altcoins. In other words, any crypto except BTC is an altcoin, including LTC.
  12. Litecoin is heavily dependent on the economics
    Even though cryptocurrency is recognized as an independent financial system, it is surprisingly influenced by other currency markets and the general state of the worldwide economy. In March 2020, all the digital currencies, including Litecoin, were devastated by the huge fall, which was caused by the COVID-19 and historic low price on oil globally as the OPEC oil cartel failed to agree to a supply cut. Thus, Litecoin and other coins faced a 30-40$ fall.
  13. LTC Whales
    In the crypto scene, whales are user accounts that hold the enormous amount of coins in their e-wallets. According to the study, which analyzed 140,000 crypto addresses, the majority of all the Litecoins in the world are owned by just 189 non-exchange addresses.

The Sources

  1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fork_(blockchain)
  2. https://litecoin.com/en/about
  3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Litecoin
  4. https://litecoin.com/en/about
  5. https://litecoin-foundation.org/about-us/
  6. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Litecoin
  7. https://crypto.com/en/wallet.html
  8. https://www.bitdegree.org/tutorials/should-i-buy-litecoin/
  9. https://www.investopedia.com/terms/b/blockchain.asp
  10. https://www.investopedia.com/tech/how-do-you-mine-litecoin/
  11. https://www.coindesk.com/litecoin-just-halved-its-crypto-rewards-for-miners
  12. https://www.mycryptopedia.com/litecoin-scrypt-algorithm-explained/
  13. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/319945691_HOW_BLOCKCHAIN_AND_CRYPTOCURRENCY_TECHNOLOGY_COULD_REVOLUTIONIZE_ONLINE_GAMBLING
  14. https://nomics.com/assets/ltc-litecoin
  15. https://crypto-money.io/interesting-facts-about-litecoin-that-you-should-know/
  16. https://litecoin.org/
  17. https://www.cryptocoinsrevolution.com/hashing-algorithm-litecoin.php#.XrWLlC1t6YU
  18. https://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/042015/bitcoin-vs-litecoin-whats-difference.asp
  19. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Litecoin
  20. https://coinmarketcap.com/
  21. https://www.investopedia.com/terms/a/altcoin.asp
  22. https://www.forbes.com/sites/billybambrough/2020/03/12/crypto-carnage-wipes-out-2020-gains-for-bitcoin-ethereum-ripples-xrp-litecoin-and-bitcoin-cash/#4558a65855ac
  23. https://news.bitcoin.com/whales-control-most-of-litecoin-many-ethereum-tokens/