Lite Coin White Paper
Litecoin is the result of some of us who joined together on IRC in an effort to create areal alternative currency similar to Bitcoin. We wanted to make a coin that is silver toBitcoin'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 networkthat is fully decentralized without any central authorities. Mathematics secures thenetwork and empowers individuals to control their own finances. Litecoin features fastertransaction confirmation times and improved storage efficiency than the leading mathbased currency. With substantial industry support, trade volume and liquidity, Litecoin isa 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 getshalved 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 youroption, 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 thiscoin after it was released. - Dead (~5 gh/s)

Lite Coin White PaperSolidCoin - Innovative quick transaction times. Appears to have been run agroundby 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 isvery 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 sofar. - Alive, but limping (~0.0001 gh/s)

We wanted the best innovations of Bitcoin and these other currencies to create a coinwith all of their benefits, but nearly none of their problems.
Proof of WorkWe 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 theimplementation.
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 fairmanner. Having one person (or a group) control a large amount of coins that can beused as they see fit is against the decentralized vision of Bitcoin. Yes, it is true thatwithout 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 weknow 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 mostmerchants 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 forminers) means we expect to not see the sort of problem Namecoin encountered; hashingpower that leaves more suddenly than it came, causing a high difficulty slog foreveryone 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 generationis halved. Bitcoin generation is halved every 210,000 blocks. Litecoin generation will behalved every 840,000 blocks. For those of you doing the math, Litecoin is scheduled toproduce 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 werereleased 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 thelaunch. 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 andeveryone 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 thischain. As expected, there was a lot of natural orphaning of blocks, due to having somany 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 morethan 8 connections.
And default RPC port is 9332. This is the port miners will use to communicate with yourclient/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

See also Bitcoin white paper