Lite Coin White Paper

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. Various alternative currencies have come and gone. Some brought

innovation, but they all had problems.

Litecoin is a peer-to-peer Internet currency that enables instant, near-zero cost

payments to anyone in the world. Litecoin is an open source, global payment network

that is fully decentralized without any central authorities. Mathematics secures the

network and empowers individuals to control their own finances. Litecoin features faster

transaction confirmation times and improved storage efficiency than the leading math-

based currency. With substantial industry support, trade volume and liquidity, Litecoin is

a proven medium of commerce complementary to Bitcoin.

Blockchain

The Litecoin blockchain is capable of handling higher transaction volume than its

counterpart - Bitcoin. Due to more frequent block generation, the network supports

more transactions without a need to modify the software in the future.

As a result, merchants get faster confirmation times, while still having ability to wait for

more confirmations when selling bigger ticket items.

Wallet Encryption

Wallet encryption allows you to secure your wallet, so that you can view transactions

and your account balance, but are required to enter your password before spending

litecoins.

This provides protection from wallet-stealing viruses and trojans as well as a sanity

check before sending payments.

Mining Reward

Miners are currently awarded with 25 new litecoins per block, an amount which gets

halved roughly every 4 years (every 840,000 blocks).

The Litecoin network is therefore scheduled to produce 84 million litecoins, which is 4

times as many currency units as Bitcoin.

Open Source Software

Litecoin is an open source software project released under the MIT/X11 license which

gives you the power to run, modify, and copy the software and to distribute, at your

option, modified copies of the software. The software is released in a transparent

process that allows for independent verification of binaries and their corresponding

source code.

 ixcoin - Nasakioto premined 580k coins. Seemed like a pump and dump.

Competed with Bitcoin for GPU resources - Dead (~2 gh/s)

 i0coin - Basically ixcoin without the premine. Not much support was given to this

coin after it was released. - Dead (~5 gh/s)

Lite Coin White Paper

 SolidCoin - Innovative quick transaction times. Appears to have been run aground

by CoinHunter, its creator, due to insecure changes and immature forum

presence. - Dead, shutdown by CoinHunter

 GeistGeld - Lolcust premined 7.7 million coins. 15 second block time is probably

a bit extreme. - Alive, but limping (~15 gh/s)

 Tenebrix - Lolcust premined 7.7 million coins. CPU proof of work using scrypt is

very innovative. Price doing fairly well on btc-e.com. - Alive (~0.003 gh/s)

 Fairbrix - Basically Tenebrix without the premine. First launch was crippled due

to bad config. Relaunch attacked initially - Doing OK now, but no exchange so

far. - Alive, but limping (~0.0001 gh/s)

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.

Proof of Work

We really liked Tenebrix's Scrypt proof of work. Using Scrypt allows one to mine Litecoin

while also mining Bitcoin. We humbly offer a big thanks to ArtForz for the

implementation.

Premines

Litecoin will come with 150 premined coins: just the genesis block and the first 2 blocks

to confirm the genesis is valid. We believe a coin needs to be released in a fair

manner. Having one person (or a group) control a large amount of coins that can be

used as they see fit is against the decentralized vision of Bitcoin. Yes, it is true that

without a stash of premined coins, we will not be able to afford to pay for bounties, but

we believe people will see the virtue of this coin, invest in it as early adopters, and will

be willing to spend time creating services to make this coin better.

Fast transactions

We were impressed by the convenience of SolidCoin's fast transactions. Although we

know that fast confirmations are not necessarily as secure as Bitcoin's slower

confirmations, they are very convenient for small merchants who don't need transactions

to be super secure. The average Litecoin block takes 2.5 minutes, one quarter of

Bitcoin's 10 minutes. So if merchants wanted to be as safe as Bitcoin, they can wait for

4 times the number of Litecoin confirmations as compared to Bitcoin. But most

merchants can readily accept 1-confirmed transactions for small amounts of litecoins.

Difficulty retarget

We will keep the retarget block the same as Bitcoin's 2016, but because blocks are found

4 times faster, difficulty will retarget about every 3.5 days. The combination of fast

retarget times and Scrypt proof of work (Litecoin will not compete with Bitcoin for

miners) means we expect to not see the sort of problem Namecoin encountered; hashing

power that leaves more suddenly than it came, causing a high difficulty slog for

everyone who stayed.

Coin generation

Miners will generate 50 coins per block. In light of our faster blocks, to properly mimic

Lite Coin White Paper

Bitcoin's generation trajectory, we needed to change the blocks at which coin generation

is halved. Bitcoin generation is halved every 210,000 blocks. Litecoin generation will be

halved every 840,000 blocks. For those of you doing the math, Litecoin is scheduled to

produce roughly 4 times as many coins as Bitcoin, about 84 million litecoins.

Fairness

We have come up with a plan that we believe is most fair. Some previous coins were

released without Windows binaries or without source code; we consider this as unfair as

it is unsafe.

We released the source code and binaries ahead of time... 3 days before launch. People

had time to compile the source and run the client on their machines against the Litecoin

testnet. So people were able to make sure everything was working well before the

launch. We also had a poll so that people can vote for a launch time that best suits

them. At the time of the launch (Oct 12 03:00 GMT), we released the genesis hash and

everyone started mining at the same time. All it took was a simple change in the config

file in order to mine the real coin instead of the testnet coin.

51% attack

The problem with alternative currencies is that the network hashrate is likely low when

the coin starts up, making an easy target for any potential 51% attacker. With a little

hope, a little prayer, a lot of hype, and due to our innovative release, there was a large

hashrate from minute one. We believe this deterred any attackers from targeting this

chain. As expected, there was a lot of natural orphaning of blocks, due to having so

many people mining on the chain at once. With block locking at every difficulty change,

we were able to avoid any attacks from succeeding. (if there were any)

Source code

The source code is here:

https://github.com/litecoin-project/litecoin

This is based on the latest Bitcoin code. You can either build the daemon version

(litecoind) or you can build the gui version (Litecoin QT). See the build docs.

Similar to Bitcoin, you may want to create a litecoin.conf file here:

Windows: C:\Documents and Settings\<username>\Application Data\Litecoin

Win7: C:\Users\<username>\AppData\Roaming\Litecoin

Mac: ~/Library/Application Support/Litecoin

Unix: ~/.litecoin

Port is 9333. Open if on your router if you know how. This will allow you to have more

than 8 connections.

And default RPC port is 9332. This is the port miners will use to communicate with your

client/daemon.

Sample litecoin.conf file:

Code:

server=1

rpcuser=user

Lite Coin White Paper

rpcpassword=password

#Change this if you want to use a different rpc port for mining

#rpcport=9332

#Only uncomment this if you are running litecoind and want to run Litecoin in the

background (not Litecoin QT)

#daemon=1