Forked from Bitcoin, Litecoin is a peer-to-peer Internet crypto currency that enables instant, near-zero cost payments to anyone in the world. Similar to its big brother, Litecoin is an open source, global payment network that is fully decentralized without any central authorities. The Litecoin blockchain is capable of handling higher transaction volume than Bitcoin.
Due to more frequent block generation, the network supports more transactions without a need to modify the software in the future. 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. In this post let us discuss about some the enhancements planned by litecoin team in its roadmap.
Due to more frequent block generation, the network supports more transactions without a need to modify the software in the future. 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. In this post let us discuss about some the enhancements planned by litecoin team in its roadmap.
BIP173 - Bech32 ADDRESS
This change is basically meant to make the address more secure and increasing the length of the address format designed for segregated witness. This change will also remove the use of uppercase letters in the address and the same is mitigated by increasing the address length more by 15%.
A Bech32 string is at most 90 characters long and consists of:
- The human-readable part, which is intended to convey the type of data or anything else that is relevant for the reader. Its validity (including the used set of characters) is application specific, but restricted to ASCII characters with values in the range 33-126.
- The separator, which is always "1". In case "1" is allowed inside the human-readable part, the last one in the string is the separator.
- The data part, which is at least 6 characters long and only consists of alphanumeric characters excluding "1", "b", "i", and "o".
M ADDRESS
M address feature is meant to change script addresses of Litecoin. Instead of starting with a 3, they start with an M. This change will help differentiate Bitcoin script addresses with Litecoin script addresses, both of which currently start with 3, so there is certainly a good reason to do it.
Current Script Address: 3J7PYDywoeETi5VTweCMshNuTGKz62P23k
Planned Script Address: MQKXr7Pukm5tWamN3XBhhLdJmxvS6iwsSc
Though this is simply a cosmetic change from a development perspective, the intention of LT team is very clear. They want to be unique and come out of the shadow of bitcoin atleast from marketing perspective, even though the technology is more or less similar to Bitcoin.
Current Script Address: 3J7PYDywoeETi5VTweCMshNuTGKz62P23k
Planned Script Address: MQKXr7Pukm5tWamN3XBhhLdJmxvS6iwsSc
Though this is simply a cosmetic change from a development perspective, the intention of LT team is very clear. They want to be unique and come out of the shadow of bitcoin atleast from marketing perspective, even though the technology is more or less similar to Bitcoin.
Once this entire conversion is complete, Litecoin script addresses will look unique when compared to Bitcoin script addresses. Investors will benefits from this as it would avoid confusion between Bitcoin and Litecoin script addresses in their wallets.
LIGHTENING NETWORK
Lightning Network is one of the most expected technology advancement investors are expecting from litecoin founders and developers. Coblee(Charlie Lee), Ultragtx and Wangxinxi are working on this and we can expect some good news sooner.
Understanding payment channel(heart of lightening networks): A real time example for payment channel is the end of the day settlement happens between banks. We can perform unlimited transaction between different customers of different banks. But during settlement the money is moved by collating all the transaction and settling the difference in total transaction value.
Understanding payment channel(heart of lightening networks): A real time example for payment channel is the end of the day settlement happens between banks. We can perform unlimited transaction between different customers of different banks. But during settlement the money is moved by collating all the transaction and settling the difference in total transaction value.
Payment Channel is a class of similar techniques designed to allow users to make multiple Bitcoin transactions without commiting all of the transactions to the Bitcoin block chain network. In a typical payment channel, only two transactions are added to the block chain but an unlimited or nearly unlimted number of payments can be made between the participants.
Litecoin does not have a block size problem. That’s right, and SegWit is not just a block scaling solution. I would even say block scaling is just a side benefit of SegWit. The main fix is transaction malleability, which would allow Lightning Networks (LN) to be built on top of Litecoin.
Lightning Network is a proposed implementation of Hashed Timelock Contracts (intermediate transactions that are not registered in blockchain network are stored in side-chains, secured with hash codes) with bi-directional payment channels which allows payments to be securely routed across multiple peer-to-peer payment channels
Litecoin does not have a block size problem. That’s right, and SegWit is not just a block scaling solution. I would even say block scaling is just a side benefit of SegWit. The main fix is transaction malleability, which would allow Lightning Networks (LN) to be built on top of Litecoin.
Lightning Network is a proposed implementation of Hashed Timelock Contracts (intermediate transactions that are not registered in blockchain network are stored in side-chains, secured with hash codes) with bi-directional payment channels which allows payments to be securely routed across multiple peer-to-peer payment channels
LITECOIN NETWORK
Litecoin network is a project to be launched by the core development team, that will track information regarding the Litecoin network, making it easily accessible and viewable in one place. The site will also track development, network economics, mining and more specific information such as memory pool size.
Litecoin Has Now Deployed Segregated Witness https://t.co/RbyKN8bp9E #litecoin #SEGWIT #blockchain #Bitcoin @SatoshiLite— Bitcoin Magazine (@BitcoinMagazine) May 10, 2017
CONCLUSION
We all know from past experience that Litecoin is always the trial room for technology advancement in crypto space. The best example for this was the segwit implemention. Litecoin is one of the oldest and biggest altcoins by market cap, deployed Segregated Witness (SegWit).
The Segregated Witness soft fork activated without major issues in May 2017. With Charlie Lee giving full focus to Litecoin, we can expect more from his team going forward. Though Litecoin is a straight fork of Bitcoin’s codebase, with a different mining algorithm and some changed parameters, I am sure that the team behind litecoin is more focused, less noisy and united compared to its big brother at this point in time. :)
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