Litecoin is a peer-to-peer Internet currency that enables instant payments to
anyone in the world. It is based on the Bitcoin protocol but differs from
Bitcoin in that it can be efficiently mined with consumer-grade hardware.
Litecoin provides faster transaction confirmations (2.5 minutes on average) and
uses memory-hard, scrypt-based mining proof-of-work algorithm to target the
regular computers and GPUs most people already have. The Litecoin network is
scheduled to produce 84 million currency units.

One of the aims of Litecoin was to provide a mining algorithm that could run at
the same time, on the same hardware used to mine bitcoins. With the rise of
specialized ASICs for Bitcoin, Litecoin continues to satisfy these goals. It is
unlikely for ASIC mining to be developed for Litecoin until the currency is
widely used.