Litecoin (CRYPTO: LTC), the cryptocurrency that was conceived to provide fast, secure, and low-cost payments through the blockchain has turned 10 years old.
The Coin: LTC was released on Oct. 7, 2011, and the network went live five days later on Oct. 13, 2011.
Today, it is the 15th largest coin by market capitalization and scores 0.54% in terms of market dominance, as per CoinMarketCap data.
LTC has a market cap of approximately $12.35 billion and a circulating supply of 68.7 million tokens.
See Also: How To Buy Litecoin (LTC)
The Early Days: LTC, which is an early fork of Bitcoin (CRYPTO: BTC), was founded by Charlie Lee, a former employee of the Alphabet Inc (NASDAQ:GOOGL) (NASDAQ:GOOG) subsidiary Google.
On Thursday, Lee reminisced about the early days of LTC in a Twitter thread. The LTC founder said there were a number of early altcoins that failed to survive like Namecoin, Ixcoin, Locoin, Solidcoin, etc.
“I basically took everything that’s good from these altcoins (speed, CPU mining) and did a fair launch. And that’s why Litecoin succeeded where others failed,” wrote Lee.
“The name Litecoin came to me pretty quickly. I thought of something like an Elitecoin first. Then Litecoin jumped out.”
Lee also shared the launch thread that was first published on Bitcointalk.org. He revealed that the New York Times headline about the death of Apple Inc (NASDAQ:AAPL) co-founder Steve Jobs was included in the genesis hash of LTC.
So I had to do some reverse engineering and managed to create the genesis block on 10/7/11https://t.co/lArbbucLGU
What a lot of people didn’t know is that I put the headline of Steve Job’s death in the genesis hash. This proves that the genesis block was created after 10/5/11. pic.twitter.com/Zn7tnRBgUM
— Charlie Lee (@SatoshiLite) October 7, 2021
Lee could not help but take a dig at Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin, who had criticized the choice of name for Litecoin.
I forgot to mention that I chose Litecoin because Litecoin is the lighter version of Bitcoin. It’s faster, cheaper, and easier to use.
And we got to see a young & unknown (at the time) @VitalikButerin hating on the name. I prefer Litecoin over Etherium. Wait, is it Ethereum? pic.twitter.com/kCLUUNbiel
— Charlie Lee (@SatoshiLite) October 7, 2021
The Investment: LTC hit an all-time high of $412.96 in May and is trading 56.46% below those levels. At press time, over 24 hours, LTC traded 2.82% higher at $180.18.
Since 2021 began, LTC has gained 43.29%. In comparison, BTC has risen 84.58% in the same time frame.
The earliest CoinMarketCap data available shows that LTC traded at $4.35 on April 28, 2013. If an investor would have stuck with their investment since then, they would have gained a whopping 4042.06% until now.
This means $1,000 invested at the time would have purchased 229.88 LTC, which today would be worth $41,420.69.
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