Litecoin (LTC): A Comprehensive Overview - History, Features & Purpose

Founded and released on October 7, 2011, by Charlie Lee, a former Google employee and former Engineering Director at Coinbase. Lee designed Litecoin as a “lite version to Bitcoin” to help complement it by solving some of the more apparent issues, including but not limited to transaction times, fees, and concentrated mining pools.

Sounds Like Bitcoin. Why So Similar?

Because it is. While it wasn’t the first cryptocurrency to mimic and/or copy Bitcoin’s code, it was certainly one of the earliest and most significant, serving as the third largest cryptocurrency in existence, under XRP.

For this reason, there are many similarities and borrowed traits from the core code of Bitcoin, which have been modified to work in a way that would be best suited for large-scale adoption of the currency. Think of Litecoin as the best of both worlds (Bitcoin and a sibling).

Litecoin is Fast. But How Fast?

Litecoin was specifically designed to help reduce transaction times and fees, a major downside to Bitcoin transactions, which took approximately 6-10 minutes (up to 1 hour of wait time) for a block to be confirmed and a transaction to be concluded. Serving to expedite a user transactions, Litecoin takes Bitcoin’s 10 minute block confirmation time and reduces it to 2.5 minutes. As a result, users only wait 2.5 minutes for a Litecoin block to be mined, generating up to 25 coins.

It is for this reason that Litecoin is considered to be 4x faster than Bitcoin and an extremely attractive alternative to Bitcoin. It is important to note that network congestion time across the board does play a role in block mining times, bringing wait time to approximately 29 minutes.