What is Litecoin?

Litecoin (LTC) claimed the status of silver (compared to Bitcoin's gold status). It works very similar to Bitcoin and differs mainly in parameters such as hashing algorithm (scrypt), coin supply limit (84 million) and average blocktime(2.5 minutes).

Litecoin was launched in 2011 by former Google engineer Charlie Lee, in order to enable CPU mining at a time when GPUs took over as Bitcoin's primary mining driver. However people later managed to port Scrypt over to GPU as well as ASICs, yet tecoin has still managed to remain mostly in top 10 cyptocurrency list (ordered by market capitalization).