Litecoin

Litecoin ( sign: Ł; Abbreviation: LTC) is a peer- to-peer crypto- currency, integrated into an open- source software project that was again released under the MIT/X11 License.

History

Litecoin was published on 7 October 2011 on an open-source client on GitHub.

The current version of the official client is 0.8.6.2 (January 11, 2014).

Description

The Litecoin system is technically almost identical implemented as the Bitcoin system. The creation and transfer of Litecoins based on an open -source encryption protocol and is therefore not centrally controlled.

A peer-to -peer network similar to that of Bitcoin manages all transactions, budgets and expenditures. Litecoins be created by will be generated based on a cryptographic hash function blocks. This process, in which it applies, a hash to "find" is called mining. The rate used to generate the blocks, forms a geometric series, and halves every four years until a predefined volume is reached by Litecoins ( inflation protection ). Litecoins, as Bitcoins, singl on only one computer for one person or spread over several systems that include more than one person, be produced in so-called pools.

As a Bitcoin, any Litecoin be divided into smaller units 100,000,000.

Litecoins can be exchanged in both fiat money and in Bitcoins, which is handled mostly through online exchanges ( Digital Currency Exchangers ).

Bookable back transactions ( such as transactions via credit card) are rarely used to buy Litecoins because transactions are irreversible with Litecoins and thus the risk of unwanted chargeback, so-called chargebacks.

On February 3, 2014 corresponding to 1 LTC approximately $ 21.50 or 0.028 BTC. Measured by market capitalization is Litecoin with $ 550 million, the second largest crypto currency.

Differences to Bitcoin

Litecoin was developed as an alternative currency Bitcoin crypto and differs from it in at least four points:

• Blocks the network Litecoin generated every 2.5 minutes instead of every 10 minutes, which results to the clients in faster transaction confirmations.

• The Litecoin network therefore also produced throughout the course four times as many units as Bitcoins, whereby the number of Litecoins converges to 84 million.

• In contrast to Bitcoins, which is used for SHA256, used Litecoin Scrypt in his proof-of -work algorithm: a special sequential function, conceived and described by Colin Percival.

• The cryptographic hash function was Scrypt specifically designed to discourage brute- force attacks with specialized hardware such as FPGAs and ASICs. She uses to the fact that memory is relatively expensive. For this reason, has been intentionally designed Scrypt very memory consuming. Therefore, for the mining of Litecoins graphics processors (GPUs ), which, inter alia, are designed for the handling of textures and other larger data sets or have access to the main memory of the CPU, well suited, and it is comparatively expensive to successfully implement devices with FPGAs or ASICs.