Gm, today is Litecoin’s 12th birthday.
During its existence, Litecoin has been Bitcoin’s incentivized testnet:
1. in May 2017, Charlie Lee pushed SegWit activation and put $1 million as a bounty in a LTC SegWit address. This destroyed the FUD about SegWit and sped up activation on Bitcoin. To this day, the money is still there and worth 10x more for anyone who thinks they can claim it.
2. in November 2017, Litecoin performed the first mainnet cross-chain atomic swap on the Lightning Network. A lot of early Lightning testing was done using LTC, so devs wouldn’t lose their BTC.
3. in February 2022, after years of looking at ways to add confidential transactions for fungibility, Litecoin activated Mimble Wimble Extension Blocks (MWEB). Besides the privacy benefits, this soft fork is also a bona fide block size increase.
MWEB is based on a 2016 proposal by Blockstream researcher Andrew Poelstra, so it’s 100% compatible with the Bitcoin codebase. Since it seems to work pretty well, Bitcoin may use it too if there’s enough user demand for privacy and more scalability.
After activating MWEB, Litecoin also got delisted from a few exchanges that feared that privacy would bring trouble. But this set an important precedent, as the biggest exchanges, payments processors & ATMs still support the coin – which means that confidential transactions are now safer and more normalized.
Litecoin started out as a carbon copy of Bitcoin, with three main changes: block time, supply, and mining algorithm. But now that it finds itself at the avantgarde of privacy and still remains compatible with the Bitcoin codebase, it’s a valuable experimentation layer which, unlike a testnet, has real users and money to be made from exploiting bugs.
So if something works for a while on Litecoin, it’s good enough for Bitcoin too – granted that users want it.
While some folks refer to Litecoin as a “shitcoin” which provides little to no value and inflates the 21 million coins cap, the market disagrees. Litecoin resisted through 3 halving cycles without seeing a drastic reduction in hash rate. This means that the price never went to 0 and the increases kept the miners going.
It outlived all of its contemporaries (nobody talks about Feathercoin, Peercoin and Terracoin anymore), it proved its usefulness in key moments from Bitcoin’s history, and it continues to experiment with features that can be ported 1:1 to Bitcoin.
Happy birthday, Litecoin! #Litecoin #LitecoinFam #LTC
