What is Litecoin (LTC)?Litecoin was founded in 2011, 3 years after the creation of Bitcoin in 2008 .
It was developed by Charlie Lee as a blockchain fork of the world's first cryptocurrency, but with radical differences.
Furthermore, Litecoin is considered the oldest active fork of Bitcoin.According to the developer team behind crypto, LTC is:“A P2P digital currency that allows instant payments at almost zero cost.
Furthermore, Litecoin is an open source global payment network which, like Bitcoin, is completely decentralized… Litecoin is a means of commerce to complement Bitcoin ”, says the Litecoin team on its official website.What differentiates LTC from BTC?Litecoin is a cryptocurrency with more in common with Bitcoin than differences, but these differences are significant.An example of this is the time it takes to generate a block of LTC which is much less than that of BTC, which goes from 10 minutes in Bitcoin to 2.5 minutes.
In addition, Litecoin has a greater number of units available and a different mining algorithm.Let's delve into these differences!SPoW consensus algorithmOne of these permanent differences that did not make the projects compatible was the change from the original mining method of Bitcoin Proof of Work (PoW) to Scrypt Proof-of-Work (SPoW), an algorithm developed in 2009, by Colin Percival.SPoW eliminates the need to use more and more computing power when the blockchain technology is increasingly used.
Bitcoin had been criticized from day one for having great goals of becoming the alternative money of the internet, but with great limitations when it comes to transaction times and costs.Therefore, a series of developers set out to develop alternatives to Bitcoin, which were faster when making transactions.