Did you believe any of these myths about Litecoin?

The Litecoin community believes in decentralisation, freedom of speech, and other keystone principles of a free society commonly upheld by cryptocurrency supporters. On one particular front though, this often backfires; centralised entities are able to coordinate better to win 'PR battles', and they're better equipped to wage wars of misinformation.

This has lead to some myths that just won't seem to die. We'll start with the biggest lie.

1. The founder sold the exact top and abandoned the project

No.

The founder is the current head of the Litecoin Foundation and works on developing Litecoin full-time, and has been working on Litecoin for 10 years now. In this sense he is one of the longest-working cryptocurrency founders in the space.

Charlie Lee divested his holdings in 3 sales 5 years ago, for an average price of $205. This is 49.5% of the All Time High. You will often hear people claiming that Charlie Lee sold the "exact top", in an attempt to turn the sale into a conspiracy theory and imply that the founder is responsible for the fact that LTC is beneath ATH. This is just folklore, a story that spreads faster because it is more interesting than the truth.

Vitalik Buterin's $1.3 billion Ethereum wallet scattered its ETH in May last year. This did not prompt speculation that ETH is a 'pump 'n' dump' scheme. Chris Larsen of Ripple sells millions of dollars worth of $XRP every single month, in fact, the Ripple Foundation possesses around 60% of all the $XRP tokens in existence, and selling those tokens is how they fund the Foundation. They sell their $XRP on a published monthly schedule. The condemnation they get for this is nothing close to that experienced by Charlie Lee.

Every other founder apart from Satoshi seems to have allocated themself a generous helping of all of their projects' tokens. If it seems bizarre that the fairest-launched large-cap cryptocurrency gets attacked the most for this, that's because it is. No more than around 0.5% of the total Litecoin supply were sold by Charlie Lee 5 years ago - yet we're still hearing about it. It seems very likely that there is an ulterior motive behind these narratives. Additionally, an unknown portion of this divestment was in the form of giveaways and donations, that did not yield a profit.

Here are the founder's own words explaining the decision.

"It is [a] conflict of interest for me to hold LTC [...] because I have so much influence."

"I have always refrained from buying/selling LTC before or after my major tweets, but this is something only I know. And there will always be a doubt on whether any of my actions were to further my own personal wealth above the success of litecoin and cryptocurrency in general.”

"Owning coins is unrelated to working on a project. A lot of crypto leaders have a ton of coins but don’t work on the project and have left (Satoshi, for example). Many never bought their own coins (e.g. Jackson Palmer). Most probably sold without telling anyone."

To sum this up: Charlie Lee has always been one of the central figures in communicating news about the development of Litecoin. This had the potential to cause legal issues, especially regarding securities law, and it allowed people to freely make the accusation that Lee was only making those announcements in order to move the price and allow him to trade as an insider. These sorts of accusations are difficult to deal with on a personal level while also hurting trust in the Litecoin network. Charlie Lee revealed those accusations to be without merit.

Think of Satoshi Nakamoto's genesis wallets; a collection of the earliest BTC wallets containing around 1,000,000 BTC, that people watch constantly out of fear that they ever stir. If they did, there'd be an unprecedented crash.

Litecoin holders have no such anvil hanging over their heads. This is because of the decision that the founder made in 2017, to continue working on the project, but to detach his own financial success from the performance of Litecoin.

He continues to personally match ALL donations to the Litecoin Foundation.

On a brighter note, it is very clear that new Litecoin investors and users, are not interested at all in the drama surrounding the sale of those tokens. This issue is well and truly in the past, and attempts to use this 5-year-old sale to attack the project are looking more and more like what they actually are; motivated by crypto politics and inter-project competition, rather than by anything of substance.

2) Litecoin does not see any development

Totally wrong.

People often check for github commits when comparing which chains are experiencing the most rapid development, but uploading works in progress to github is not considered best practice. Like many other crypto projects (such as Bitcoin), Litecoin development occurs on development forks of the main chain, with github code commits only occurring when the development and main fork codes are merged. This happens mostly when a new version is published. This is the best practice way to develop a blockchain; it's more organised and streamlined.

The most recent development is happening on a MWEB dev fork - one of many. Take a look for yourself!

The worst thing by far about saying that Litecoin doesn't develop, is that Litecoin developers were some of the true pioneers of cryptocurrency, who were there right at the very start, tackling the most fundamental problems. Accusing Litecoin of having no development erases their life's work and belittles their part in the cryptocurrency revolution. This one is a particularly low blow, even in such a competitive industry: if you trace any major breakthrough in crypto back to its origin, you will usually find Litecoin developers at the forefront of it:

Litecoin developers sent the first ever Lightning Network Transaction, on Litecoin. Yes, Litecoin had a working Lightning Network before Bitcoin did.

Litecoin developers made the two first ever trustless, cross-chain swaps of cryptocurrencies, using a technique known as Atomic Swaps. This was a massive breakthrough moment for cryptocurrency. The birth of Decentralised Finance AND the Lightning Network can be traced back to this moment, as atomic swap techniques are integral to both, as both use cryptographic techniques utilised within Atomic Swaps.

Mimblewimble Extension Blocks - a gargantuan, multi-year project - is the result of their identification of fungibility and privacy as the most relevant target to help cryptocurrencies continue to disrupt traditional finance into the future. At Look Into Litecoin, we firmly agree.

Litecoin developers have been on the cutting edge of cryptocurrency development since the very start, they are still here now, and they will still be here in the future.

3) Litecoin is a copy of Bitcoin

No.

There has been some controversy within the Bitcoin community recently, after Greenpeace received a $5m donation from Larsen (of Ripple) to fund a campaign against Bitcoin's Proof of Work 'SHA256' algorithm. They produced a short video, urging miners to stop supporting Proof of Work and start supporting Proof of Stake.

The reaction from the Bitcoin community was powerful. It can't be said that Bitcoiners are worried that this change will be implemented, but their depth of feeling is very clear: the mere suggestion of such a high impact code change has made them very angry indeed. Many have disavowed Greenpeace, saying they will never donate again. An excellent takedown video was created almost immediately, demonstrating how the evidence that Greenpeace (and others) are using against Bitcoin is incomplete and very poorly interpreted.

Changing the code away from SHA256 is, rightly, seen as a hugely significant code change, that would change the fundamental nature of Bitcoin. The algorithm on which the POW runs is the most fundamental part of the blockchain, determining many of its parameters with regards to security, scalability and speed.

However, when Litecoin changed the algorithm from SHA256 (which was invented by the US National Security Agency (NSA) in 2001) to Scrypt (which was invented in the private sector by Oxford University graduate and computer scientist Colin Percival after the creation of Bitcoin) ... this was called an insignificant and minor change by Bitcoin maximalists, akin to simple copying.

Scrypt has many advantages over SHA256. By offloading some of the longer strings of data into memory, the computing power needed for each hash is reduced. The need for memory alongside computing power when hashing with Scrypt, means that the generation of new hashes is limited by memory write speed. This makes it harder for software to guess Litecoin private keys by brute force and makes it more difficult for a single entity to 51% attack the network, as they need to increase memory availability in line with hashrate.

This makes sense when you consider that Litecoin's hashing algorithm is 8 years newer than Bitcoin's. Technology moves quickly and Scrypt is a significant upgrade over SHA256. Very few new cryptocurrencies use SHA256, while a lot of them continue to use Scrypt. Investors may be preferring Bitcoin at the moment, but users continuously choose to move their funds over Scrypt networks than over SHA256 networks; they are simply faster and cheaper, because of improved, more modern architecture.

Summary

Litecoin is a highly relevant and rapidly evolving blockchain, home to some of the best, most experienced and most committed talent in the cryptocurrency space. It is one of the only fairly launched cryptocurrencies with an active founder, and so in the true spirit of disinformation, other founders like to project their guilt onto Litecoin and accuse it of being a 'pump and dump' scheme. Those words apply far more to their own projects than they do to Litecoin.

Thank you for reading! You've reached the end. I know the rest of the internet is already beckoning, but could you read on for a moment longer? We're all volunteers here who are passionate about Litecoin and want to be able to continue advocating for it. There's a way you can support us to do that, for free: if you took a moment to follow the steps below, it would mean the world! 👇

Support Look Into Litecoin's Growth!

Here is a referral link for Nexo wallet. If you use it to open an account and leave $100 in it for 30 days, you get $25 and so does Look Into Litecoin. It doesn't cost you anything, you just have to move some crypto for a short while. Afterwards, you can move it back out for free (not even a transaction fee). You earn 4-8% APR on it too, paid daily.

1) Follow this link and sign up for a Nexo account

2) Deposit 1 LTC** for 30 days and earn 4-8% APR each day, paid in-kind*

*(i.e. LTC earns LTC, BTC earns BTC, etc).

After the 30 days you and Look for Litecoin will receive $25. If you choose, you can withdraw your LTC, along with any interest earned, at the end of this period. As above, Nexo even covers the transaction fee.

**technically you can deposit $100 of any asset they support in order to qualify, but we'd prefer it if it was Litecoin.

By way of a disclaimer - an unfortunate necessity! - Look Into Litecoin are utilising an existing referral incentive framework provided by Nexo, to Nexo customers. We are not affiliated with Nexo; in fact they don't know we exist. Please don't interpret our explanation of the referral rules as a guarantee of any sort, and make sure you double check the conditions of the referral program yourself first, in case they have changed. Thank you!

If just a fraction of the visitors to this site could do this, it would give LookIntoLitecoin a boost towards being a reliable source of educational Litecoin content, without costing anyone a penny (except Nexo, who don't get to complain: it was their idea). If you already have Nexo or don't want it, but would still like to support us - thank you! Some 'tip jar' addresses are below 👇

Support us in making the case for Litecoin :)

👑

📭LTC - MFEXHxAyUvP4mSevKcdmatnoaDqdWQRUPz

📭BNB/ETH/AVAX/FTM - 0xf8ed35407Ab37e4206c09A660DcDFe9162423Bb3

📭BTC - 1BHEdzAiSL1A8WfvuwYXJcuwgqt5dWvMQU

📭DOGE - DPoG36Xx34tVj5xAgnqEryPgXbepqY8bVm

(let us know if you'd like us to support others)