A Faster Approach
Introduced in 2011, Litecoin is a peer-to-peer cryptocurrency. It’s has often been said that Litecoin is silver to Bitcoin’s gold.
Litecoin was created by a Charlie Lee, who had worked at Google and the digital currency platform Coinbase. Litecoin was designed to process transactions on the blockchain faster (2.5 minute block transaction times vs Bitcoin’s 10)and it’s only releasing 84 million currency units in its lifetime, a small circulation of coins compared to the billions of coins released some of the other big players in the cryptocurrency space.
Litecoin was one of the first major cryptos to adopt SegWit (Segregated Witness). A SegWit is in a sense a soft fork. In turn, a soft fork is a change that generates new blockchain rules which is backwards compatible with the current software standards. It is also one of the first to adopt the Lightning Network, which creates instantaneous transactions and scales transaction volumes on the blockchain.
A difference between Litecoin and Bitcoin lies in security. Litecoin implements the SCRIPT hash algorithm while Bitcoin utilizes SHA-256 to authenticate transactions on the blockchain.
A hash algorithm basically takes a number as a key then puts that key through a complex algorithm to get back a hash value.
Litecoin’s SCRIPT algorithm is faster and has less energy consumption than SHA-256, but SHA-256 is considered the more secure of the two, with less errors dealing with data message integrity.