What is Litecoin Cash (LCC)?

Hard forks have become mainstream recently in the crypto realm. Thus, Litecoin cash came up as a result of hard forking from a well-known Litecoin blockchain. Unlike Bitcoin Cash or Ethereum Classic, there were no significant reasons for that, making the whole community surprised. Yet, this split turned out to be absolutely authorized and, what’s more, even regular enough in the domain. 

So, Litecoin Cash was shaped after a hard forking process on the relevant blockchain at block No.1,371,111. Just like others, every single LTC owner has the right to LCC at a ratio of 10:1, meaning ten LCC for each LTC.

As for hashing algorithm, this one is applying SHA-256, just like Bitcoin is. This is for drawing the attention of miners whose gear is outdated to mine BTC. Litecoin employs Scrypt for hashing. What’s more, to avoid the leapfrogging of the pool, LCC adopted the DarkGravity V3 algorithm from Dash to tackle the mining troubles at each block.

The miners do not experience those hardships for the first 24 blocks, decreasing proportionless advantage to the very first ones. Yet, the team left less than 1% of the circulating supply mined within it as development funds.

It takes about 2.5 minutes to create a block here, just like within Litecoin. Yet, LCC developers declare that the transactions’ cost will be reduced by 90% compared to LTC. Besides, LCC has integrated Segregated Witness from the very beginning. 

For your information, SegWit is the mechanism meaning the block size cap on a blockchain is augmented by omitting signature information from transactions. When specific elements of the transaction are skipped, this creates room or capacity to include more transactions in the chain.

It wasn’t necessary for Litecoin to hold this hard fork, unlike Ethereum or Bitcoin. The news about the LCC coin generated buzz amongst members since the team did not give a clear reason for that. Besides, Litecoin’s father Charlee Lee tweeted at a time that he and the squad were not related to the hard fork and suggested it might be a scam. 

However, it’s a common practice so the team did not do anything wrong. What’s more, the team turned to Twitter to address scammers and revealed that LCC would never request or keep private keys. 

It also announced that the project’s source code would go public on Github. The venture got backed with the wallet platform Coinomi. Herewith, the team is working on its own wallet.

Although most developers revealed their names and photos on the LCC website, they did not include their public profiles. This fact does not annul the venture’s legitimacy, as so many scam projects exist in the market. But it’s crucial right now to know who’s behind the scene. 

How Does it Work?

In order to facilitate maths when dealing with the coin, they took a decision to swap 10 to 1. To illustrate, when working with BTC and transacting, often users have to deal with fractions of one BTC, which is not always practical. For seasoned players, it’s not a problem but newbies and just ordinary users need a currency that makes no trouble to work with. 

The Litecoin Cash operates on its own blockchain and contains characteristics from certain reputable coins:

• Decreased transaction commission, improved difficulty regulation and mining with SHA256 (against Litecoin)
• Improved speed, more affordable, more bandwidth, and improved difficulty retargeting (against Bitcoin)
• Features SegWit and block times are way faster (against Bitcoin Cash)

The most essential differences are the mining algorithm and difficulty regulation. As previously mentioned, the LiteCoin Cash migrated from Scrypt system to SHA256. The team behind the project states this will lead to a sort of recycling of outdated Bitcoin mining hardware that can be exploited to support the LCC network.

The difficulty regulation is built in a proof of work network and designed for miners. As gear’s speed is up, so is the difficulty. This fuels the network’s stability in the long run and maintains block times at a firn rate. 

Dash in due time worked out the DarkGravity difficulty regulation, and LCC exploits it successfully. This makes the network safer since block times have become more reliable, even though there are frequent swings in mining power as far as the network expands. 

About LCC

The new fork was created at block 1371111 of the Litecoin blockchain. The initiators say that one of the biggest advantages of this is a smooth partition of new coins. As Litecoin is a reputable brand in the domain, the fork initiators cannot be blamed for hoarding coins because new ones are delivered to current Litecoin holders right when there’s forking. 

A few words about the team

When investigating the developers and the team in general, you won’t find much information on LinkedIn. Yet, you can find some information about the founders of the venture on the official website. 

Iain Craig, a senior developer, comes with a 20-year background in the commercial domain and took part in the creation of some altcoins and blockchain-related services. Yet, guys provided a few videos with interviews to the crypto community via socials. 

What’s the difference between the original token and the hard fork?

Charlie Lee, the father of the original one, was not that happy about the new venture and even cut down any involvement into it, dubbing it a scam. In PSA, he admitted that the team was not forking Litecoin. What’s more, he suggested it was a scam that would attempt to mislead the crypto community, especially the Lotecoin one. Mr. Lee advised not to believe it and not to leave sensitive data like keys or seed on questionable websites or to third parties. 

Later, in one of the interviews, he restated the previous opinion. He said that people were confused with this splitting. But the team was not interested in it. He suggested that some people were attempting to get richer and trying to tie the project to Litecoin, which possibly could lend it legitimacy.

Why The Litecoin Cash Fork?

Now, let’s outline a few benefits of the Litecoin Cash:

• Beneficial proportion: 10 to 1, meaning for each 1 LTC a user holds at the fork block, they can ask for 10 LCC
• 256 algorithm: there’s been a turn to SHA256 proof-of-work hashes, which suggests exploiting outdated gear ever used for Bitcoin mining
• Network consistency: The difficulty of mining is addressed with the DarkGravity V3 algorithm that proved its effectiveness. Now, block times are even more predictable and the network is more shielded from multipool hopping.  
• More streamlined for real-life use: a 2.5 min block time delivers four times the performance bandwidth of Bitcoin, herewith, costs are decreased by 90% compared to LTC
• Advantageous block compensation: to avoid an unfair prevailing of early miners, block rewards begin at 0.25 LCC and augment to 250 LCC during the first 2000 blocks after the process started. The initial 24 blocks after the start will be mined at least difficulty. Then, DarkGravity will regulate it according to tracked block generation time. The 250 LCC block compensation (equal to 25 LTC) will be cut in half at similar chain heights as LTC
• Secured Litecoin cash foundation: one percent of the circulating money supply during the fork was allocated to a development team.

Coin Supply & Sustainability

Ten for one swap at a time of LTC hard fork resulted in the overall supply of 840 million coins. In daily use, the supply rests at 576 million coins, which makes sixty-nine percent of the total one. 

To remind, the team left 1% of the overall supply mined from the very beginning. Premining is a necessary measure to pay for the team’s work and cover initial expenses. 

Currently, what makes a problem is that there’s a sort of supervision over the use of funds assigned to development and marketing staff. It’s not clear if the team will throw all their digital assets on the market to get more valuable ones like BTC. It’s quite complicated to predict the long-term sustainability of the LTC network since strong control systems are still work in progress for the whole industry.

Sustainability of mining

As stated before, Litecoin Cash aims at addressing the out-of-date BTC mining hardware gear market. The miners of Bitcoin continuously lead the competition at very high levels by engaging in advanced hardware. 

However, the environmental impact of Bitcoin is still questionable. The main problems are electricity consumption and hardware waste. In the long run, if LCC is capable of reusing outdated gear in a more efficient way, this might become a great advantage for the network.

Where Can You Buy Litecoin Cash?

The trading began in 2018 at a $5 price point. But then the price dropped hitting $0.04 as of the publication time. 2017 was wild in terms of speculation, but the following year, the bear market did not change the general price. However, if LCC aims at making the coin a go-to one, the market needs to see a fresh interest from backers to drive confidence in their concept.

Now, where to buy Litecoin Cash?

Obviously, when willing to purchase the LCC coin, exchanges might help. Do your little research and find the one with a significant overall volume. Make sure it allows you to jump in and out easily of a position. 

Litecoin Cash trading volumes might skyrocket, had it appeared on the listing of Binance. The official website states the reps have already applied for it. Decentralized exchanges also welcome the coin any time soon.  

Where Can You Store it?

The team has developed a light and full Litecoin Cash wallet for reserving this digital asset. For the light Electrum one, there’s no need in the whole blockchain. Yet, for now, users can only find its desktop versions for Mac and Windows. Also, they can find mobile ones that allow using them on the move. 

LCC fans can download the whole blockchain and keep it on their device. They can find all the mentioned wallets on Github by way of the official website. As for hardware Litecoin cash wallet, in 2018 the team had to secure Ledger & Trezor. For now, it’s pretty unclear whether they accepted the coin.

Here’s a little guide on how to claim Litecoin Cash. To do this, an Exodus wallet will be just the thing. It’s crucial to mention that this fork is not related to the Litecoin foundation.  However, the forking happened and you can claim new coins. Here are practical steps:

• Download an authorized wallet and start syncing the blockchain
• Make your actual Litecoin wallet empty of any digital asset
• Place LTC private key on Exodus 
• Bring in it from Exodus wallet to Litecoin Cash one 
• Re-sync wallet, not you get your free Litecoin cash

It’s pivotal to know that when you made the last step, your private key is forever undermined. Never again turn to the address tied up with the private key.

Final take

Litecoin Cash comes with an attractive proposition. One of the biggest bonuses is the fact that the concept of Litecoin Cash is based on an established project. As far as additional forks roll out on the market, they have to bring innovative solutions delivering real-life value to backers.

LCC claims to take the best features from all crypto projects. It looks like a great endeavor but pioneers like Litecoin and Bitcoin are practically unbeatable due to one simple reason – they were the first.  

It becomes more and more complicated to form a community around the project that is amongst thousand of the like and prove a unique value of it. One thing is clear – we’ll see a bit later if the project and the coin will outlast their counterparts. In the meantime, make sure you dig out updated info about the venture from reputable sources.

Disclaimer: Please keep in mind that the content of this article is not financial or investing advice. The information provided is the author’s opinion only and should not be considered as direct recommendations for trading or investment. Any article reader or website visitor should consider multiple viewpoints and become familiar with all local regulations before cryptocurrency investment. We do not make any warranties about reliability and accuracy of this information.