Litecoin (LTC) sustainability report

Litecoin is present on the following networks: Litecoin.

Litecoin secures its ledger with Proof of Work. Full nodes hold the entire chain and verify independently that each transaction is properly signed and spends outputs not already consumed, while mining machines assemble verified transactions into candidate blocks and hash the block header repeatedly, varying a counter, until the digest falls below the difficulty threshold in force. The hash function is Scrypt rather than the SHA-256 used by Bitcoin. Scrypt was selected for its memory requirement, which for a period kept commodity hardware competitive; that period has long passed, and dedicated Scrypt machines now perform almost all of the work, so the algorithm's practical significance today is that it defines a distinct hardware market rather than that it keeps specialized equipment out.

Blocks target an interval of two and a half minutes, and difficulty is recalculated every 2,016 blocks, roughly every three and a half days, from how quickly the preceding window was mined. Nodes follow the branch carrying the greatest accumulated work, so competing branches are resolved as soon as one extends further. Confirmation is probabilistic and hardens with depth; there is no separate finality gadget.

Litecoin is the parent chain in an auxiliary Proof of Work arrangement with Dogecoin that has operated since 2014. A miner hashing a Litecoin header can simultaneously commit to a Dogecoin block by embedding a reference to it in the coinbase, and a single solution can satisfy both chains. The work is performed once; the second chain rides on it. This makes the Scrypt hash rate effectively shared between the two networks, and it is why their capacity rises and falls together.

A soft fork activated in 2022 added extension blocks implementing a MimbleWimble-style transaction format. Value can be moved into this separate structure, transacted there with amounts hidden by commitments and with no persistent addresses recorded, and moved back out again. Extension blocks are attached to ordinary blocks and validated by the same mining process, so consensus is unchanged; older nodes continue to follow the chain without understanding the contents of the extension.

Litecoin is present on the following networks: Litecoin.

Miners are paid from two sources. The first is a block subsidy of newly issued units of the network's native asset, granted to whoever produces an accepted block. That subsidy is halved every 840,000 blocks, approximately every four years, and issuance stops once the protocol's ceiling of 84 million units is reached, after which fees are intended to carry the whole cost of block production. The second is the fees attached to the transactions a block contains. The network has no staking, no delegation and no bonded collateral, so there is nothing to slash, no jailing and no validator set to be ejected from. A miner that publishes an invalid block is simply ignored: other nodes reject it and the electricity spent returns nothing.

Merged mining adds a third consideration. Because the same Scrypt work also earns rewards on Dogecoin, a miner's income is the combined total from both chains, and the economics of operating Scrypt equipment are set by that combined figure rather than by either chain alone.

Users pay a fee denominated in the native asset and sized by the amount of block space a transaction occupies, measured in bytes rather than by any measure of computational effort. Wallets estimate a rate per byte from recent mempool conditions; raising it improves a transaction's position when miners choose what to include, and lowering it risks a longer wait. No portion of the fee is burned and there is no protocol-set base fee, so the entire amount goes to the block producer. Blocks are capped in size, which is what makes space rivalrous and gives the fee its function, though demand has generally left ample room.

Transactions using the confidential extension blocks pay in the same way, with their fee determined by the space they take up in the extension and by the cost of moving value in and out of it. The network stores no account balances requiring ongoing payment and executes no general-purpose contract code, so there is neither storage rent nor an execution charge; the only recurring cost to a user is the per-transaction fee.

Litecoin is present on the following networks: Litecoin.

The consumption figure for this network is a modeled estimate of what its mining fleet draws rather than a metered reading. The estimation approach used here works top down from mining economics, on the premise that the machines actually running are those earning more than they cost to operate, and that mining equipment accounts for effectively all of the network's electricity.

Hardware is first restricted to devices able to compute Scrypt, since nothing else can contribute work to this chain. Manufacturer specifications give each device a hash rate and a power draw, and therefore an efficiency in energy per unit of work. A break-even threshold is then established by comparing what a unit of hashing earns, read from subsidies and fees recorded on the chain, against a representative electricity price and other operating costs. Machines falling below that threshold are treated as switched off. The rest are apportioned shares of the network's observed hash rate, and total consumption is the sum over models of share multiplied by power characteristics.

Merged mining is the decisive adjustment for this chain and is handled explicitly. This network and Dogecoin are defended by identical Scrypt work: a miner hashes once and submits qualifying solutions to both, so the electricity behind the two chains is one quantity, not two. Estimating each chain independently and adding the results would double-count it. Instead the shared consumption is modeled once and split between the chains in proportion to the mining revenue each one contributes. Because the companion chain supplies a large fraction of a Scrypt miner's income, the share assigned to this network is materially smaller than an isolated model of its own hash rate would suggest, and the split shifts as the relative reward levels of the two chains change.

The limits of the method should be read alongside the number. The fleet composition is inferred from commercially available equipment and plausible profitability, not observed directly; a single assumed electricity price and overhead factor stands in for wide real variation; and the profitability test compresses investment decisions taken over years into a snapshot. Where a parameter cannot be pinned down, the assumption used is the one producing the higher estimate, so the reported value is more likely high than low, and it is revised as better hardware and chain data become available.

Litecoin is present on the following networks: Litecoin.

The renewable share reported here is obtained by establishing where the network's electricity is consumed and then applying the generation mix of those places. On a Proof of Work chain that consumption sits almost entirely in mining equipment rather than in ordinary relay nodes, so the geographic question concerns the location of that equipment. Locations are inferred from publicly observable network data, including the addresses and metadata of reachable peers and whatever the pools that coordinate mining work disclose publicly, and each is resolved to a country or region. Coverage is never complete, because mining machines do not identify their whereabouts and pool operators need not publish their customers' locations. Where the footprint cannot be established with confidence, the observed distribution of a structurally comparable network is used in its place, meaning one whose consensus family and reward structure attract similar operators to similar electricity. That substitution is well supported for this chain, since its hash power is shared with another Scrypt network and the two therefore occupy the same physical estate.

The country weights that result are matched to national statistics on the renewable proportion of each grid's generation, and a weighted average across the footprint yields the share attributed to the network. Those statistics are drawn from Share of electricity generated by renewables, compiled from Ember's yearly electricity data and the Energy Institute's Statistical Review of World Energy, with major processing by Our World in Data.

Energy intensity is a separate quantity from the annual total and is defined as the marginal energy cost of one further transaction, meaning the change in consumption from settling one more. Hashing on this chain proceeds at the same rate whether blocks are full or nearly so, which makes the connection between throughput and energy weak; the figure is therefore an allocation of a largely fixed consumption across observed activity rather than a measure of what an individual transfer causes to be spent. The shared nature of Scrypt mining reinforces this, since the underlying electricity is not attributable to this chain alone.

Both inputs are approximate. National averages mask regional and seasonal differences in generation, and mining capacity clusters around cheap power rather than distributing evenly within a country, so the renewable share should be read as an estimate rather than a precise value.

Litecoin is present on the following networks: Litecoin.

The emissions reported for this network follow from its estimated electricity consumption combined with the carbon intensity of the grids supplying it, so the same geographic work underpins them as underpins the renewable share. Mining equipment accounts for essentially all of the electricity, and the question is which grids it draws from.

Locations are inferred from publicly observable network data, including peer addresses and metadata and any public disclosures by the pools coordinating mining work, and are resolved to countries or regions. Where the footprint cannot be observed with confidence, the distribution of a structurally comparable network is substituted, selected for a matching consensus family and reward structure. For this chain the substitution rests on firm ground, since its Scrypt work is shared with a companion network whose mining estate is by definition the same one.

Two scopes are distinguished. Scope 1 covers emissions released by sources the infrastructure's operators control directly, such as fuel combusted on site. For a network whose participants buy electricity from a grid and run computing equipment on it, this is ordinarily nil, and it is reported as nil rather than folded into the other scope. Scope 2 covers the indirect emissions embodied in that purchased electricity and carries the network's entire footprint. It is computed by weighting each region's share of estimated consumption by that region's emissions per unit of electricity generated and summing across the footprint. The intensity values used come from Carbon intensity of electricity generation, compiled from Ember's yearly electricity data together with the Energy Institute's Statistical Review of World Energy, with major processing by Our World in Data and released under a CC BY 4.0 license.

Greenhouse gas intensity is stated per transaction, as the marginal emission associated with settling one more. It inherits every uncertainty in the consumption estimate and adds those of the grid data: published intensities are annual national averages that conceal hourly and seasonal movement, and mining does not distribute evenly inside a country. Because the shared Scrypt work is split between two chains, the allocation basis affects the result as well. Where a parameter is unresolved the conservative option is taken, which tends to overstate rather than understate, and the figures are restated as observation improves.