What Is Litecoin Cash?
Litecoin Cash is a software fork based on Litecoin’s code. But a software fork is not technically a fork; it’s more like a copy of some sorts. Litecoin itself resulted from a source-code fork of Bitcoin.
The fork occurred at the 1371111th block of Litecoin’s blockchain. Its developers claim that one of the major advantages of forking from an existing blockchain is that the coins are evenly distributed.
The Team
Not much information regarding the core or associate team is available on LinkedIn. However, there is some information about the LCC project creators on their website.
Iain Craig (Tanner), its lead developer, has two decades of working in the commercial field and has been involved in the developing several altcoins and blockchain-based services since 2013.
Litecoin vs Litecoin Cash
Litecoin’s creator Charlie Lee was not all that thrilled about this new project, and publically denied that he and his team had anything to do with it, calling it a scam.
“PSA: The Litecoin team and I are not forking Litecoin. Any forks that you hear about is a scam trying to confuse you to think it’s related to Litecoin. Don’t fall for it and definitely don’t enter your private keys or seed into their website or client. Be careful out there!” – tweeted Lee regarding the LCC fork.
In an interview provided later on, he still reaffirmed his opinion about the fork:
“It confuses people into thinking Litecoin is splitting. The Litecoin community has no interest in splitting. It’s just some people trying to make a quick buck. And calling it Litecoin gives them some legitimacy.”
Even though Litecoin is also a fork, it avoided using the same name like in the case of LCC.
The LCC team claimed that re-using an original coin’s name in a forked coin is just an industry convention. But most suspect is that they are using the original coin’s name to make people believe that their own crypto is legitimate.
Technical Differences
The Litecoin Cash mining algorithm does not use Litecoin’s Scrypt system, instead, it is implementing Bitcoin’s SHA256 protocol. Its developers believe that the use of this protocol will encourage users to employ old Bitcoin mining computers to mine LCC.
After each block, the chain’s mining difficulty is recalculated. For this, LCC implemented Evan Duffield’s DarkGravity V3 algorithm, which was developed for Dash. The algorithm was designed to make block times more stable and deter large fluctuations in mining power when the network increases in size.
Coin Analysis
LCC’s total supply is capped at 840 million coins due to the 10 for 1 swap at fork time. A trader that owned Litecoin at the fork block was able to claim LCC coins at a 10:1 ration. This meant that for 1 LTC the trader got 10 LCC.
The current circulating supply is around 606,468,707 LCCs which represent 71% of the total supply. 1% of the total supply was allegedly pre-mined before the launch in order to pay development costs and personnel.
The block rewards will start at 0.25 LCC and increase to 250 LCC in the first 2000 post-fork blocks. The first 24 blocks after the fork will have the minimum mining difficulty, after which the DarkGravity algorithm will change the difficulty according to block generation time.
Litecoin Cash entered the trading markets on Feb 20, 2018, and at that time it has a price of over $5. But since then the price took a major plunge (which might have been influenced by Lee’s responses), reaching a trading value of $0.015002 at the time of writing.
The coin is currently ranked 233rd with a market cap of $9,098,247 USD.
Exchanges That Support LCC
There are not many exchanges that currently support Litecoin Cash. These are: Mercatox, STEX, CryptoBridge, SouthXchange, Tradesatoshi, and YoBit.
However, the overall volume for LCC is rather low, with Mercatox handling 72,49% of the total volume of LCC (at the time of writing). The coin is mostly traded against BTC, with limited options against ETH, USD, DOGE, and LTC.
The team stated that the coin is to be listed on Binance and decentralized exchanges like the Komodo BarterDEX.
Compatible wallets
The LCC coin can be stored in Electrum and Coinomi wallets. Users can also download the entire LC blockchain and store it locally.
Summary
Litecoin Cash is a new altcoin that mixes various elements from different coins (BTC, LTC, DASH), but it remains to be seen if it can even compete with these major coins. So far, things aren’t looking too good for LCC price wise.
