Litecoin (LTC or Ł[1]) is a peer-to-peer cryptocurrency and open source software project released under the MIT/X11 license.[2]Creation and transfer of coins is based on an open source cryptographic protocol and is not managed by any central authority.[2][3]While inspired by, and in most regards technically nearly identical to Bitcoin (BTC), Litecoin has some technical improvements over Bitcoin, and most other major cryptocurrencies, such as the adoption of Segregated Witness, and the Lightning Network.[4]These effectively allow a greater amount of transactions to be processed by the network in a given time, reducing potential bottlenecks, as seen with Bitcoin.[5]Litecoin also has almost zero payment cost and facilitates payments approximately four times faster than Bitcoin.[6]Contents 1 2 3 4 5 6 Litecoin was released via an open-source client on GitHub on October 7, 2011 by Charlie Lee, a former Google employee.It was a fork of the Bitcoin Core client, differing primarily by having a decreased block generation time (2.5 minutes), increased maximum number of coins, different hashing algorithm (scrypt, instead of SHA-256), and a slightly modified GUI.[7]

During the month of November 2013, the aggregate value of Litecoin experienced massive growth which included a 100% leap within 24 hours.[8]Litecoin reached a $1 billion marketcap in November 2013.[9]As of May 9, 2017, its market capitalization is US$1,542,657,077 at around $30 per coin.[10][11]In May 2017, Litecoin became the first of the top-5 (by market cap) cryptocurrencies to adopt Segregated Witness.[12]Later in May of the same year, the first Lightning Network transaction was completed through litecoin, transferring 0.00000001 LTC from Zurich to San Francisco in under one second.[13]Litecoin version 0.8.5.1 was released in November 2013.The release included fixes for vulnerabilities and added enhanced security to the Litecoin network.The Litecoin developer team released version 0.8.6.1 in early December 2013.The new version offered a 20x reduction in transaction fees, along with other security and performance improvements in the client and network.The source code and binaries were released early to people in the "#litecoin" IRC channel, on the official Litecoin forums, and on Reddit, with information for power users to add a Litecoin supernode to the configuration file, while the main site was to be updated after enough of the network was running the new version.

This release method was used to ensure that the low fee transactions from version 0.8.6.1 clients would not be delayed by clients running older versions.In April 2014, a new version of Litecoin was released, version 0.8.7.1, which fixed some minor issues along with an important fix related to the Heartbleed security bug.litecoin pools chartLitecoin offers three key differences from Bitcoin.bitcoin yourstoryThe original intended purpose of using Scrypt was to allow miners to mine both Bitcoin and Litecoin at the same time.ethereum criptomonedaThe choice to use scrypt was also partially to avoid giving advantage to video card (GPU), FPGA and ASIC miners over CPU miners.ethereum mining tutorial

Due to Litecoin's use of the scrypt algorithm, FPGA and ASIC devices made for mining Litecoin are more complicated to create and more expensive to produce than they are for Bitcoin, which uses SHA-256.[16]trade bitcoin with mt4This is widely due to the Scrypt hashing scheme being more memory intensive; increasing memory requirements for ASICs and FPGAs.bitcoin qt wallet import^ ^ a b c ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ /currencies/litecoin/ ^ ^ /Blockstream/status/862420329888595969 ^ ^ ^ ^ Cryptography portal Economics portal Free software portal Internet portal Numismatics portalBitcoin miners have begun signalling Segwit2x despite fierce opposition from segments of the community, as Litecoin and Dash grow to take its place as digital money.About a month ago, business leaders and heads of large mining pools came together before the Consensys 2017 conference to discuss a compromise in Bitcon scaling solutions.

A compromise was reached, which would include a 2mb block size increase as well as Segregated Witness, or Segwit, in an effort to appease both sides of the scaling debate.As of today, the vast majority of the mining power is signalling for the Segwit2x compromise.BW Pool is now signaling for SegWit2x.Now at ~71% of bitcoin network hash ratehttps://t.co/gtmZ4H3p1o https://t.co/MMYIZnVD5F — Barry Silbert (@barrysilbert) June 19, 2017 Segwit2x signalling countered by continuing UASF opposition Despite the progress made by the Segwit2x compromise proposal, the Bitcoin world remains far from united.Many SegWit supporters were not happy with the compromise, feeling that many parties, including the Bitcoin Core developers, were not included in the scaling compromise agreement.As such, support for BIP148, also known as the user-activated soft fork or UASF, remains fierce.Faced with a potential chain split if UASF gains enough traction, large mining company Bitmain has prepared a hard-fork contingency plan to protect its users in case of a chain split resulting in two Bitcoins.

Community divisions remain deep, keeping alive the distinct possibility that Bitcoin could split in August.“Old Bitcoin” support for a digital cash flows to other coins As Bitcoin continues to attempt to resolve its divides, its fees and confirmation times remain too high for easy use as a digital cash, one of its original purposes.Meanwhile, digital cash cryptocurrencies, namely Dash and Litecoin, have seen impressive gains recently.Dash once again crested the $200 mark, reaching a new all-time high of $208 over the weekend.Litecoin has also done very well, retaining a solid 4th place in the charts and claiming nearly 6% of Bitcoin’s market cap, as well as temporarily exceeding its trading volume.Combined, Dash and Litecoin account for greater than Bitcoin’s 24-hour trading volume at time of writing, as well as nearly 10% of its market cap.Guide for Bitcoin & Litecoin mining by Janika Kouki If you are looking to mine Bitcoins or Litecoins with Minergate pool, here are some useful instructions from the member of our team Janika.

My name is Janika and I am very fresh in the world of cryptocurrency.I have never tried to mine one of the “major” cryptocurrencies and today I want to prove you that it is not that difficult even for a novice.Just put your mind to it, I will do my best to help you.First of all, you need to know that your mining performance will depend on your hardware.Litecoin and especially Bitcoin require powerful resources to be mined profitably.There are several possibilities to choose from.First of all, you can use the hashing power of your CPU (central processing unit) or GPU (graphic processing unit), by which I obviously mean graphics card.It is safe to say that you will get better results using the latter, but of course you are free to experiment.The third option appeared in 2013 when hardware developers from China released first ASICs (application-specific integrated circuits) to mine Bitcoin even faster.Simply put, an ASIC is a microchip that makes the required calculations extremely quickly.

The first cryptocurrency became quite famous in 2011 when Bitcoin reached the price of about $1000.More and more miners joined the network, the difficulty rose and you could run your hardware for weeks without being able to find a single block mining solo.It was a waste of power and money, so miners started to gather into mining pools.MinerGate is one of those mining pools.The miners form a network to combine their computing  powers and have a better chance to find a block.The reward is then spread evenly between the participants of the pool depending on the hashes sent.The more powerful hardware you have, the more hashes you will send.The competition is very high, so I strongly advise you to do some research before you start mining any of the coins.There are lots of forums where miners share the results they get, you can also create a topic on our forum and discuss the possible outcome for your hardware.The producers of ASICs usually mention the potential hashrate on the package.

I can also advise you to visit the pages with hardware comparison: Miners often ask me how to set up Bitcoin or Litecoin mining on our pool.Well, here is the answer.Bitcoin mining is available on MinerGate in a form of cloud mining contract.It means that you are leasing the power to mine Bitcoin and don’t set up anything yourself.We’ve covered more on the subject in one of the blog posts.You can create a contract on this page.Download a miner that supports Litecoin mining.There are lots of programs available with console or graphic interface.Your final choice depends only on your personal preferences.Connect to MinerGate pool using this address: 3.The settings may vary depending on the miner, there is no universal recipe here.Usually you can find the information on the website/forum thread where you download the application.Your pool login is the email for your MinerGate account.Instead of password, just enter x.In theory it all seems relatively simple and clear.To prove that anyone can do it, I tried it myself in practice.

l am writing this article on a simple laptop, which also became my testing mining rig.Maybe it’s not the perfect machine for mining purposes, although please remember that I do this purely for research.CPU is the only way to mine for me, so I needed to find an application for CPU mining.It wasn’t that hard: there are multiple solutions available.Of course, GUI miners are easier to use but I refused to cut the corners or look for an easy way, so I downloaded pooler’s CPU miner, which works in console mode.Chrome recognized it as a malicious software, so I went to the advanced settings and disabled protection provided.If you need to do it as well, don’t forget to reenable it after the download, as there are lots of phishing sites, better safe than sorry.At first, it was quite difficult for me to get used to command line interface, although I wanted to prove that any newbie can succeed with the right attitude.I did my research and managed to figure out the settings.The miner I used provides help if you enter –-help, there you can find all the commands available.

In my case, the settings looked like this: I pressed Enter and it worked!In a couple of minutes I got the first “yay!”, which means that I found a good share.It was one small step for Litecoin mining history and one giant leap for me.Q.E.D., I’ve proven it – a complete newbie like me with a regular laptop like mine can actually set up mining of one of the major cryptocurrencies.When the sense of wonder gave place to reason and I got a couple of “booos” (bad shares), I cooled down a bit and decided to calculate my potential income in the MinerGate’s Mining Profitability Calculator.The hashrate my laptop was able to reach for Litecoin was about 14-16 kH/s, which seemed really surprising at first as I could get only about 20-22 H/s for Bytecoin, for example.I entered my best hashrate (16 kH/s) and held my breath… What?Only $0.00047 a day?Okay, still must be more than what I would make of 22 H/s on one of the CryptoNote coins.As you can see, I would have made about 20 times more mining the most profitable CryptoNote currency for that moment even if I had seemingly about 700 times less hashrate than mining Litecoin.

What is the trick here?Different algorithms reach very different hashrates on the same hardware.Bitcoin is based on SHA-256, Litecoin is based on Scrypt and most of the coins from our pool are based on CryptoNote (technically, it’s CryptoNight and CryptoNote is the technology it is based upon).CryptoNote is a solid choice for CPU mining, GPU performance may vary.You can try for yourself and share your results with us.The developers deem the algorithm to be a base for egalitarian cryptocurrencies that anybody can mine, that’s why it is also ASIC-resistant.Read more about the technology on the official CryptoNote website.Hopefully, I was able to give you a rather comprehensive introduction to Bitcoin and Litecoin mining on MinerGate pool.It is not that intricate, although still takes some time and energy to get used to.All you need to do is to dedicate some time to research and I’m sure you will find a perfect match for you and your hardware on our pool.Download our miner to start your journey.