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Litecoin is currently ranked 22nd among cryptocurrencies with a market cap of $8 billion.
The LTC network has no centralized governing bodies, and it has fast transaction confirmation times with virtually zero payment costs, its development pursued a number of goals that were not realized in Bitcoin.
Litecoin (LTC) was created in 2011 by Charlie Lee, a former IT engineer. It was publicly announced as a cryptocurrency that complements rather than replaces Bitcoin. As Litecoin is a fork of Bitcoin, they share a number of similarities — both are decentralized electronic currencies, and both blockchains consist of chains of blocks, each containing information about the time it was altered, transaction data, and data from the previous block, encoded in a small fixed size. At the same time, there are differences between them that explain the reason for the emergence of LTC.
Like Bitcoin, Litecoin can be mined. Bitcoin mining is only available to those who have expensive and complex equipment, while anyone with a computer and internet access can mine Litecoin. The difference is that Litecoin uses a proof-of-work algorithm called Scrypt. Mining Litecoin requires large amounts of RAM instead of computational power, as is the case with Bitcoin. In other words, it is less energy-intensive — you do not need advanced equipment to mine Litecoin, just the memory available on your computer.
Litecoin transactions are confirmed 4 times faster than Bitcoin transactions — it takes 2.5 minutes to confirm a transaction. Although both cryptocurrencies have implemented SegWit (Segregated Witness), LTC was the first to introduce Lightning Network (LN) support. SegWit is one of Bitcoin's soft forks, an update to the code that addresses the issue of block size limitation and malleability, while also leading to faster block generation, whereas the Lightning Network allows for off-chain transactions, reduces transaction fees (if any), and ensures faster confirmation.
Like its older brother Litecoin, Litecoin is not infinite: its issuance is capped at 84 million.
Litecoin transactions are cheaper than Bitcoin transactions. Moreover, due to the low price, Litecoin is more accessible to users worldwide for their everyday transactions.
One could say that Charlie Lee created the true 'silver to Bitcoin's gold,' as he himself called LTC. Many users think that Charlie Lee is Satoshi Nakamoto, the mysterious creator of Bitcoin, who chose to reveal his identity after the coin's initial success — they find it amazing and questionable that an IT engineer created such a successful and advanced coin like LTC in a relatively short period.
Litecoin is also notable for helping to secure the Dogecoin blockchain, which, despite being created as a joke in 2014, entered the top 20 projects with a market capitalization of $58 billion. Litecoin provides network security for Dogecoin through a process called 'merged mining.'
A stable network, fast transactions, low fees, and the possibility of inexpensive mining are the main positive features of LTC. This will, sooner or later, lead to a significant increase in its value.