Happy 13th Birthday, Litecoin!

Imagine it’s 2011: Bitcoin was the only available cryptocurrency (worth just a few rands); people could mine with their personal computers; Satoshi Nakamoto had recently vanished; there was no crypto exchange. 2011 was also the year the infamous Silk Road launched.

Meanwhile, a new, ‘lite’ version of Bitcoin was brewing in the background. It is now among the most popular and oldest digital currencies, first going live exactly 13 years ago. So, happy birthday to the coin they call the “silver to Bitcoin's gold,” Litecoin!

How Litecoin started

The birth of Litecoin couldn’t have been more perfect. Back when Bitcoin was dirt cheap, you could use the computer at home to get some BTC through mining. However, the steadily growing popularity brought an era of more advanced equipment: GPUs (graphical processing units).?

While faster than CPUs (central processing units) or regular computers, they offered a high barrier to entry for the ordinary mining hobbyist.?

A new coin called Tenebrix (TBX) was created using a new hashing algorithm, Scrypt. The latter was GPU-resistant or, in other words, wouldn’t let those lucky miners with GPU mine. However, one of the main problems was a clause in the code that gave the developers unlimited TBX coins for free.?

This is where American computer scientist Charlie Lee came in. Before being the managing director for Litecoin, Lee worked for Google and was the engineering director at the Coinbase crypto exchange.?

Lee put his own spin on Tenebrix with a new digital currency named Fairbrix (FBX). While keeping the same Scrypt-based coin, the computer wizard also included a few things that make Bitcoin great. Among these was a feature where Fairbrix had a limited coin supply.?

Due to his frequent posts on Bitcointalk, the Fairbrix community asked Lee to take over the project in the first week of October 2011. Soon after, Lee commented by saying:

“Fairbrix is a GPU-unfriendly coin based on Lolcust's Tenebrix. The main difference between Fairbrix and Tenebrix is that Fairbrix does not come with 7.7 million pre-mined coins. In fact, only 100 blocks were premined. Like Tenebrix, Fairbrix uses Scrypt for proof of work. This makes it hard for GPUs to calculate proof of work. So it's more cost-effective to use CPUs for Fairbrix mining.”

Lee desired a compliment and an alternative to Bitcoin instead of becoming the next one. He described it best in another Bitcointalk post:?

“Litecoin is the result of some of us who joined together on IRC in an effort to create a real alternative currency similar to Bitcoin. We wanted to make a coin that is silver to Bitcoin's gold.? We wanted the best innovations of Bitcoin and these other currencies to create a coin with all of their benefits but nearly none of their problems.”

Essentially, Litecoin is a better coin for general payment purposes as it’s much faster and cheaper. So, let’s get to the name change from Fairbrix. Lee has said getting to the name ‘Litecoin’ was simple.?

He looked for something that described a ‘lighter’ form of Bitcoin. The first term that came to mind was ‘Elitecoin’ before shortening it to the better-sounding ‘Litecoin.’?

While Litecoin was privately released on GitHub on 07 October 2011, it went publicly live six days later at exactly 5 a.m. South African time.

Interesting tidbits related to the creation of Litecoin

Here are other interesting facts related to the creation of Litecoin:

• Charlie Lee joined the then-popular Bitcointalk forum in June 2011 under usernames like ‘SatoshiLite,’ ‘chocobo,’ and ‘coblee.’

• Lee (inscribed) a line in Litecoin’s genesis hash that read “@NY Times 05/Oct/2011 Steve Jobs, Apple’s Visionary, Dies at 56” to commemorate the day of Steve Jobs’ passing.

• Charlie Lee registered the ‘litecoin.com’ domain and four other Litecoin-based domains on 04 October 2011.

• A poll happened to determine the ideal time between 12 October and 13 October 2011. In the end, 39 out of 91 (43%) people on the latter date.

The success of Litecoin

By now, Litecoin is as popular as other heavyweights like Bitcoin, Ethereum, and XRP. While the longevity of other projects has been questioned, Litecoin still stands strong 13 years later with over five million users, over 250 million transactions completed, and 100% uptime.

That’s why LTC is one of our favourite offerings, along with over 20 other cryptocurrencies on a regulated crypto exchange!?

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