Litecoin

What is Litecoin?

Litecoin is a peer-to-peer internet currency that enables instant, near-zero cost payments to anyone in the world.  Essentially, Litecoin is a modified extension of Bitcoin.

Litecoin has been dubbed the Silver counterpart to Bitcoin (Gold Standard).

History

Litecoin was created by former Google employee (current Coinbase employee) Charlie Lee.  The open-source client on Github was release on October 7th, 2011.  It was released as a fork of the Core Bitcoin client with some alterations to the source code.  Changes included:

• The block generation time was decreased from 10 minutes to 2.5 minutes.
• Use of a different hashing algorithm (called scrypt)
• Slightly Modified GUI