When Bitcoin maximalists talk about Litecoin, they often refer to it as a lazy fork: the same codebase, with 4 times faster block times and 4 times the supply. They’ll call it the result of a copy-paste operation, with no technological merit or legitimacy. However, there’s more to the picture than meets the eye.

Yes, Litecoin has a supply cap of 84 million coins (as opposed to Bitcoin’s 21 million). Of course, a new block gets mined every ~2.5 minutes (instead of Bitcoin’s 10) and the mining difficulty adjustment happens every 3 and a half days/504 blocks (as opposed to Bitcoin’s 14 days/2016 blocks). The reward halving also happens every 840.000 blocks… but due to the faster block time, the interval between epochs is still that of 4 years.

Naturally, the marketing narratives are different: Bitcoin is digital gold, while Litecoin is the silver equivalent. And yes, the messages in the genesis blocks are different too: Satoshi Nakamoto famously immortalized a political statement (”The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks”), while then-Google engineer Charlie Lee referred to the most discussed piece of news in the world of technology (”NY Times 05/Oct/2011 Steve Jobs, Apple’s Visionary, Dies at 56”).

But these facts merely scratch the surface. Many of the early Bitcoin clo nes feature similar changes of para meters — but why did Litecoin survive for almost 13 years while every other early altcoin is dead? Well, the most significant answer can be found in the mining algorithm. Compared to Bitco in’s SHA256, Litecoin’s Scrypt is more memory-intensive. In the early days, this was essential for encouraging GPU miners (who were no longer profitable due to the emergence of Bitcoin FPGAs and ASICs) to switch to mining LTC.

It was Scrypt that built communities in 2011-2013 and determined Bitcoin OGs to repurpose their stacks of graphic cards. And it was also Scrypt that kept the Litecoin network secure from 51% attacks that might have come from Bitcoin ASICs — in other words, this radically different mining algorithm played an essential role in bootstrapping the first adopters and then in establishing LTC as the prime altcoin.

Since the summer of 2014, Litecoin also adopted Dogecoin via merged mining. After all, the enthusiastic com munity of Shiba Inu lovers was just too nice to face the brutal reality of 51% attacks. In the beginning, it was a mere act of sympathy and benevolence from Charlie Lee. But since Elon Musk started tweeting about the cute dog money, DOGE became an essential part of every Litecoin miner’s revenue. Ironically, the security budget concer ns were fixed by a good boy.

Sure, Bitcoin was the first to have merged mining with Namecoin, the original altcoin. But this relationship didn’t last, as the main use case (registering domains in a decentralized way) never took off and the demand for NMC faded into obscurity as miners dropped their support and many users embraced monetary maximalism. Today, the only merged mining that Bitcoin has is through the Rootstock (RSK) sidechain — with 50% of the hash rate being involved in securing this network. However, Rootstock doesn’t have a different base currency: it uses BTC that’s locked on the base layer and issued on the parallel chain, so the miners only earn extra revenue from transaction fees. It’s also unlikely that the Bitcoin community would agree to save the other SHA256 coins (BCH, BSV, DigiByte) through merged mining. So there won’t be any extra revenue coming from altcoins, like in the case of Litecoin and Dogecoin.

Speaking of merged mining and two-way pegs, there’s a certain proposal that’s called Drivechains. It was introduced as BIP300 on Bitcoin, but it faces pretty strong opposition from some of the more conservative-minded developers. Through it, Bitcoin would be able to have a sidechain for pretty much every interesting use case (smart contracts, privacy, prediction markets, big blocks). Interestingly, during S15 E34 of the Bitcoin Takeover podcast, Charlie Lee hinted that Drivechains might be coming to Litecoin after the work with MWEB is completed. So once again, Litecoin finds itself at the forefront of Bitcoin-compatible experimentation.

This trend of openness to innovation is something which provides extra value to the network: it’s a testnet with good enough incentives, that developers who can’t prove the worthiness of their work in the more conservative Bitcoin space can use. Back in 2017, there was a lot of FUD surrounding SegWit — so Litecoin obliterated it in practice (as opposed to publishing long Reddit posts and sending compelling e-mails to the bitcoin-dev mailing list). When the Lightning network was thought to be reckless, it was the early developments on Litecoin that showed that it’s safe enough for the Bitcoin mainnet. And when the common belief was that privacy and scalability can only get added through a hard fork, Litecoin embraced MWEB: the MimbleWimble Extension block, a beautiful marriage between two of the most interesting technologies in the space.

Today, Litecoin regularly updates to keep up with the two of the most cypherpunk and decentralized codebases in the space: Bitcoin Core and Grin++. The community dared to embrace this approach to privacy as a way to acquire monetary fungibility — and the entire industry is now paying attention to the development of MWEB. Sooner or later, the Bitcoin community will also have a serious debate about soft forking a privacy upgrade. This is when Litecoin will once again prove itself useful for undergoing incentivized testing of avant-garde features for multiple years.

There’s also something to be said about philosophical differences: Bitcoin pursues a path which makes it a digital commodity much more than a currency for everyday spending. On the other hand, Litecoin is laser focused on commerce and merchant adoption. The metric for Bitcoin’s success is the price increase. In Litecoin’s case, it’s transaction volume and ranking in popular marketplaces or payments processors.

In order to support the idea of financial sovereignty, Bitcoin added RBF (Replace By Fee) to enable users to increase transaction fees or else cancel transactions (broadcast a transaction with a higher fee, whose recipient is the same sender). No Bitcoin transaction is final until at least one block confirmation has happened. Litecoin, on the other hand, embraced the zero-confirmation path: transactions are declared final the moment they get broadcast under a ”first seen” rule, so there’s no way to make any changes once the nodes have picked up information about the transaction. Bitcoin is optimized for high-value transactions for which the receiver can wait for 10 minutes or longer. Litecoin can be used to make quick purchases, under the guarantee that every transaction that gets broadcast is irreversible even before it’s mined.

Though Bitcoin and Litecoin share a common codebase and have multiple similarities in terms of functionality and end goal, they differ in both technical specifications and philosophy. At this point of its existence, the digital silver coin has acquired its own identity and comes with a distinct value proposition. Those who get it, are very much ahead of their time. All the others are either stuck in the world of monetary maximalism, or else they chase fleeting trends. In the end, truth shall prevail and the best money tech will win.