Litecoin (LTC) Calculator

Litecoin, forged in 2011 by Charlie Lee as the silver to Bitcoin’s gold, is a decentralized, peer‑to‑peer currency that mirrors Bitcoin’s UTXO model and security ethos while rebalancing the trade‑offs for speed, accessibility, and experimentation: it uses the memory‑intensive Scrypt proof‑of‑work algorithm (initially friendlier to CPU/GPU miners before the rise of Scrypt ASICs), targets 2.5‑minute blocks for quicker confirmations, caps supply at 84 million, and halves miner rewards every 840,000 blocks-roughly every four years, with halving epochs already landing in 2015, 2019, and 2023 to enforce predictable scarcity; difficulty retargets every 2016 blocks (about 3.5 days), helping the network adapt briskly to shifts in hash power, and its compatibility with SegWit (activated in 2017) and bech32 address formats (ltc1…) increases effective throughput and reduces fees while enabling the Lightning Network and cross‑chain atomic swaps that Litecoin helped pioneer, making it a practical rail for fast, low‑cost settlement; the 2022 launch of MimbleWimble Extension Blocks added opt‑in confidentiality for amounts and improved fungibility at the protocol edge, even as some jurisdictions tightened listing policies around privacy features; technically conservative yet bold in cadence, Litecoin closely tracks the Bitcoin Core codebase, advances via Litecoin Improvement Proposals, and sustains a broad tooling ecosystem (hardware and software wallets, payment processors, and merchant integrations), with miners often securing both Litecoin and Dogecoin in parallel through Scrypt mining economics that attract additional hash power to the shared hardware domain; typical payment workflows benefit from short confirmation intervals (for example, six confirmations settle in roughly 15 minutes), and script features like multisig and timelocks enable custody and invoicing schemes without sacrificing the simplicity that has underwritten Litecoin’s decade‑plus uptime, liquidity, and relevance; in a market that crowns and buries narratives by the week, Litecoin endures as a razor‑clean baseline for digital cash-fast enough for everyday transactions, conservative enough for long‑term holding, and seasoned enough to trial upgrades before they ascend to the wider cryptosphere.