Litecoin Cash announced the countdown to the launch of a new cryptocurrency that will be created from a hard fork of Litecoin. In the Litecoin block number 1,371,111, Litecoin Cash (LCC) will be created.
All the people who possess Litecoin will automatically receive 10 Litecoin Cash coins for every Litecoin they own. While Litecoin was extracted with Scrypt, Litecoin Cash will be mined with the SHA256 algorithm. This will prolong indefinitely the lifetime of the old hardware used for the mining of Bitcoin, since it is not powerful enough any more to mine the world’s most popular cryptocurrency. The low processing power required to mine Litecoin Cash will allow this old hardware to be effectively used again.
Litecoin Cash has significant advantages over other major cryptocurrencies mined with the SHA256 algorithm, such as Bitcoin (BTC) and Bitcoin Cash (BCH). While these currencies have a block time of 10 minutes, the objective of Litecoin Cash (LCC) is to shorten the block time to two and a half minutes, which also makes the transaction confirmation faster.
Compared to Litecoin, the new fork presents a reorientation in the difficulty of the superior mining, by using the Dark Gravity algorithm used by Dash. The transaction commissions are also reduced by 90% to encourage the use in the real world.
To ensure a fair launch, Litecoin Cash implements a slow-start control to block the rewards and the intend to pre-release a bootstrap file to prevent a blockchain download race once the wallets become available, which is programmed to occur shortly after the fork block is mined.
The network will use a new address prefix and replay attack prevention to eliminate the problems between chains and minimize user confusion.
The cryptocurrency markets are already used to Bitcoin hard forks, but Litecoin Cash brings a new concept and potentially a new group of users. As such, the development team behind Litecoin Cash is interested in educating the users and promoting the so-called “responsible bifurcation”.
A private key should never be posted on any website or wallet in order to claim the bifurcated currencies and the development team encourages the users to move their litecoins to a completely new address after the hard fork, before using their private key in their old address to claim their Litecoin Cash coins.
The bifurcation is expected to occur on February 19th, but it can happen some time before or after the predicted time, because the exact time of the block number 1,371,111 depends on the available Litecoin mining power.
As mentioned earlier, the Litecoin Cash development team advises to never copy your private key to any website or wallet in order to claim your bifurcated currencies. The correct process is the following: wait for the fork to happen, move your litecoins to a new address, use your private key in the old address to claim your Litecoin Cash coins.
It is really easy to claim LCC coins. It is not necessary to waste time in the debug console. Simply download a wallet for your platform from the official Litecoin Cash website and you will find a menu item to help you import your private Litecoin keys and claim your LCC coins.
