  Cryptocurrencies have garnered a lot of attention by governments and internet
enthusiasts over the past three years. These currencies are celebrated for
their security and speedy transactions in a modern era of digital commerce.
Bitcoin was the first of these currencies to gain a large advantage over
subsequent iterations. Bitcoin was first conceived by Satoshi Nakamoto who
mentioned the concept of a cryptocurrency in his paper titled Bitcoin. It
featured new concepts such as proof of work and transactions which utilized
hash based encryption. One particular alternative cryptocurrency is known as
Litecoin. Backed by a memory intensive algorithm known as Scrypt, many
cryptocurrency enthusiasts have decided to celebrate this particular coin.
Scrypt expands on Bitcoin's proof of work algorithm by adding the amount of
work it takes to commit a transaction within the Litecoin network. Scrypt
forces more work on the device that is being used to perform the algorithm by
making frequent memory requests. This makes it difficult to create specialized
hardware to create new coins and to commit transactions due to the nature of
memory intensive applications.
