Litecoin has been described as a "lightweight version of Bitcoin" and as "digital silver" compared to bitcoin being "digital gold".

The introduction of a cryptocurrency with higher accessibility and transaction throughput, better suited for payments, complements Bitcoin's role as a store of value.

The block time of Bitcoin is slow, the throughput is poor, and the threshold of miners is high.

The unique mining hash function (Scrypt) lowers the barrier to entry for miners, resulting in faster block production time and less transaction confirmation time.

First, the Litecoin network can process a block every 2.5 minutes instead of 10 minutes, thus providing faster transaction confirmation. Second, the litecoin network is expected to produce 84 million litecoins, four times the amount of money issued on the Bitcoin network. Third, Litecoin uses the scrypt encryption algorithm first proposed by Colin Percival in its proof-of-work algorithm, which makes it easier to mine litecoin on ordinary computers compared to Bitcoin. Each litecoin is divided into 100,000,000 smaller units, defined by eight decimal places.

Pay transaction costs, act as a medium of exchange for value, etc.

Proof-of-work (PoW) consensus mechanism. Unlike the SHA-256 hash function used by Bitcoin, Litecoin employs the Scrypt hash function, originally intended to limit mining to cpus and Gpus.

Litecoin follows a scarcity token economics model, allowing only limited amounts of LTC to be mined. The supply is capped at 84 million, with approximately 66 million in circulation as of July 2021. Like Bitcoin, Litecoin has experienced a block reward of about 840,000 blocks, or half in four years, which slows down the time at which new coins are mined. The Litecoin network has halved twice so far, first in 2015 and then in 2019. Block awards started at 50 LTC at launch and are currently 12.5 LTC. The next halving is estimated to occur in August 2023 and reduce the reward to 6.25ltC per piece (similar to bitcoin's current mining reward).

Litecoin has remained ahead of its competitors.

Litecoin aims to create a leaner, faster bitcoin, and there are challengers like the Nano. The Nano is faster than the Litecoin, but that comes at the cost of variability and safety. The Nano is a mesh network, with a more centralised ledger rather than a decentralised one. Double spending and other forms of financial fraud are much harder to pull off on Litecoin.

The Litecoin project emerged as an alternative solution to Bitcoin, given early concerns about waiting times for bitcoin to confirm large transactions. By making minor technical changes to the original Bitcoin source code, Litecoin allows for faster transaction speeds and lower processing fees. As one of the earliest and most successful Bitcoin derivatives, Litecoin has established itself as the fifth largest network in the digital currency ecosystem by market capitalization, complementing and enhancing Bitcoin in terms of purpose, function, and utility, and challenging our traditional ideas about money.

Litecoin's enduring success shows that shanzhai coins can stand the test of time, remain relevant and grow. Litecoin's low cost and fast transaction capabilities, as well as its growing community, have driven its adoption as a payment method accepted by thousands of merchants around the world. However, only time will tell if litecoin deserves to be the silver of Bitcoin gold.

Litecoin has been relatively stable among the top 15 cryptocurrencies by market cap compared to other copycats created around the same time.