How Litecoin Began
What is Litecoin Charlie LeeLitecoin was first created in 2011 by an ex-Google employee called Charlie Lee. Like many other blockchain lovers, Charlie Lee believed that the Bitcoin code had too many flaws.
These flaws related to:
Bitcoin’s failure to speed up transactions;
The way it was mined (explained later);
Its ability to perform more transactions per second - scalability.
Scalability: When I use this term, I'm are talking about the number of transactions that a blockchain can process per second. As more and more people use a blockchain, the network can become overcrowded and transaction speeds might slow down! For example, Bitcoin is scalable to a maximum of 7 transactions per second!
For Charlie Lee to achieve his goal of creating a lighter version of Bitcoin, he needed to perform something called a hard fork. This is where things get really interesting!
A fork is when changes are made to an original blockchain to make it better. To make things even more confusing (sorry), there are two types of forks!
A soft fork is when an upgrade is made to a blockchain, but the new block rules are still recognized by the older version. Many soft forks have been made to the Bitcoin blockchain.
What is Litecoin: a Litecoin on a keyboard.
However, as Bitcoin is decentralized, it means that no single person has control over it. If new changes are to be made, it goes to a voting system. Only if enough people vote in favor of a new change, it can go ahead. If not, then it won’t!
The second type of fork is a hard fork. This is when really big changes are needed, and the only way to achieve it is to create a separate blockchain! This is exactly what Charlie Lee did with Litecoin!
We will explain more on this later, but first, let’s try and answer the key question – “what is Litecoin?!”
What is Litecoin?
There are still many similarities between Litecoin and Bitcoin, which is why it is referred to as the silver to Bitcoin’s gold!
What is LitecoinIts main purpose is to become a global payment system. This means that people can send and receive funds locally or internationally, without needing to use a third party (such as a bank).
To be able to answer “what is Litecoin?”, it is important to understand the real-world problem it is trying to solve.
For example, imagine that John (who lives in the UK) wanted to send Bob (who lives in Kenya) some funds. If using a bank, it would:
Be really expensive.
Take days to arrive.
Require John to fill out lots of forms.
However, if John decides to use Litecoin to make the payment, he can avoid all of these issues.
Firstly, the cost of sending a Litecoin is very cheap. In fact, it costs just a few cents to send funds!
Secondly, Litecoin transactions only take 2.5 minutes to arrive, which is much quicker than a bank transfer. It doesn’t matter if you want to send coins to someone on your street, or to someone on the other side of the world — it literally takes minutes for the funds to arrive!
What is Litecoin: Comparing Litecoin VS Bitcoin.Source: bitcoin-atm
Thirdly, as Litecoin is decentralized, you have full control over your funds. This means that you do not need to fill out any forms to send your coins!
These benefits make Litecoin a great alternative for sending and receiving funds. So, now that you can answer the question “what is Litecoin?”, let’s find out how the technology works!
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