What was changed
Block time
Litecoin produces a block every 2,5 minutes against Bitcoin’s ten. A first confirmation therefore arrives four times sooner.
Supply
The cap is 84 million coins, four times Bitcoin’s 21 million.
Mining algorithm
Litecoin uses Scrypt rather than SHA-256, which in the early years kept mining accessible to ordinary hardware.
Everything else, including the accounting model and the way transactions are built, came over unchanged. Litecoin has run without a serious interruption since 2011, which is a longer uninterrupted record than almost anything else in the industry.
What a Litecoin transfer costs
Fractions of a cent, and it has stayed there through every busy period the market has had. Blocks are not congested, so there is no fee auction to lose.
Combined with 2,5-minute blocks, this gives a payment that confirms in a few minutes and costs nothing measurable. For a merchant selling something at twenty dollars, that ratio matters in a way it does not at twenty thousand.
Litecoin in a checkout
LTC is one of the oldest options in every payment gateway‘s list, and it stays there because it works. It clears fast, costs almost nothing, and has fourteen years of uptime behind it.
Its limitation is the same as Bitcoin Cash’s: the price moves. A merchant who holds LTC between the payment and the payout carries that movement. Converting on receipt removes the question entirely, which is what most businesses do.
One detail worth knowing. In 2022 Litecoin added MimbleWimble extension blocks, an optional feature that lets users make transfers with hidden amounts. Some exchanges in stricter jurisdictions responded by delisting LTC. This has no effect on ordinary transfers, which stay fully transparent, but it is worth checking that your own payout route supports the coin before enabling it.
Where Litecoin sits among the alternatives
Against Bitcoin, it is faster and cheaper and carries the same volatility.
Against Bitcoin Cash, the two solve the same problem by different routes: BCH raised the block size, Litecoin shortened the block interval. In practice the fee and the wait land in a similar place, and Litecoin has the wider support among wallets and exchanges.
Against stablecoins on a fast network, Litecoin loses on the thing that matters most to a merchant: the price of what arrives does not stay put. It wins on the fact that it needs no issuer and depends on nobody’s reserves.