Copyright (c) 2009-2013 Bitcoin Developers Copyright (c) 2011-2013 Litecoin Developers

Litecoin is a lite version of Bitcoin using scrypt as a proof-of-work algorithm.

• 2.5 minute block targets
• subsidy halves in 840k blocks (~4 years)
• ~84 million total coins

The rest is the same as Bitcoin.

• 50 coins per block
• 2016 blocks to retarget difficulty

For more information, as well as an immediately useable, binary version of

Litecoin is released under the terms of the MIT license. See COPYING for more

Developers work in their own trees, then submit pull requests when they think their feature or bug fix is ready.

If it is a simple/trivial/non-controversial change, then one of the Litecoin development team members simply pulls it.

If it is a more complicated or potentially controversial change, then the patch submitter will be asked to start a discussion (if they haven't already) on the

The patch will be accepted if there is broad consensus that it is a good thing. Developers should expect to rework and resubmit patches if the code doesn't match the project's coding conventions (see doc/coding.txt) or are controversial.

The master branch is regularly built and tested, but is not guaranteed to be

regularly to indicate new official, stable release versions of Litecoin.

Testing and code review is the bottleneck for development; we get more pull requests than we can review and test. Please be patient and help out, and remember this is a security-critical project where any mistake might cost people lots of money.

Developers are strongly encouraged to write unit tests for new code, and to submit new unit tests for old code.

Unit tests for the core code are in src/test/. To compile and run them:

cd src; make -f makefile.unix test

Unit tests for the GUI code are in src/qt/test/. To compile and run them:

qmake BITCOIN_QT_TEST=1 -o Makefile.test bitcoin-qt.pro
make -f Makefile.test
./litecoin-qt_test