Hello everyone, I am Mr. K. Today we are going to talk about: "What is Litecoin".

In addition to Bitcoin in the market, there are also some digital currencies that are widely recognized by the public, and this part of digital currency is called "mainstream currency", and Litecoin is the representative of mainstream currency.

Litecoin has a very long history. It was born on October 7, 2011, and the founder was Li Qiwei. At the very beginning, Li Qiwei came into contact with Bitcoin for the first time from an article describing the dark web "Silk Road". After learning about it, he was deeply attracted by the concept of Bitcoin "decentralized currency", so he Like most geeks, he works while participating in Bitcoin network maintenance.

However, during the mining process, Li Qiwei found that the Bitcoin network was too congested and the processing efficiency was too low, so he came up with the idea of ​​improving Bitcoin, hoping to create a digital currency with a lighter volume and faster transaction speed. So on October 8, 2011, the Litecoin creation block was born, and the Litecoin network was officially launched 5 days later, and Litecoin was also shown in the eyes of the world for the first time.

In the early days, Li Qiwei positioned Litecoin as a rival currency of Bitcoin, hoping that it could divert part of the payment transactions of Bitcoin, and finally realize the vision of using Bitcoin for large-amount payments and Litecoin for small-amount payments. Therefore, when Litecoin was initially set up, although it borrowed most of the Bitcoin network ideas, it was significantly different from Bitcoin in terms of processing speed and circulation.

In terms of block production speed, the Litecoin network processes a block every 2.5 minutes, while the Bitcoin network processes a block every 10 minutes, which means that the Litecoin network has a faster processing speed; in terms of circulation, the Bitcoin total The amount of Litecoin is 21 million, while the number of Litecoin is 4 times that of Bitcoin, 84 million.

However, the competitors of Bitcoin back then were far more than just a project called "Wright". Therefore, altcoins have never been able to compete with Bitcoin, and eventually failed one after another. That is, during this period of time, Litecoin once went to despair.

Until 2016, the Bitcoin community was divided, and everyone was arguing about "whether to adopt new technologies to solve the problem of network congestion". After all, there is a difference between theory and practice. The new technology has not been practiced yet, so who knows if it will work?

At this time, the Litecoin official decided to be a guinea pig. On July 3, 2016, the Litecoin Association released the "Litecoin Official 2016 Development Roadmap", declaring that "Segregated Witness", "Lightning Network", "Smart Coin" "Contract" and other new technologies are added to the latest version, taking the lead in conducting experiments to help Bitcoin verify the feasibility of new technologies.

In this regard, Litecoin and Bitcoin are tightly tied together, and the title of "Bit Gold, Lite Silver" has also been widely circulated. Over time, Litecoin has become an auxiliary currency of Bitcoin, helping Bitcoin to verify new technologies and share small payments and transfers.

As of today, Litecoin has gone through 8 years of history, and it is almost the only altcoin that competed with Bitcoin that is still alive. Recently, Litecoin also plans to add a new anonymous technology to the system, and there may be other projects to compete with it in the future, but I believe that Litecoin will be able to deal with it well, because it has found its own in the sky of new technologies. own direction.

Thanks to Teacher Xu Kun for his help and guidance on the content of this episode.