Those of you that bought Litecoin ($LTC) in the dip, might be able to make some attractive returns on that buy. One could think crypto is a kitchen business with all that forks and knives to catch, and now the time has come for a sleeping giant: LTC.There is LitecoinCash to come, which brands themselves as Litecoin Hard Fork, but this is just a marketing ploy due to Charlie Lee. However, this means free coins – and the project sounds pretty promising. Truth to be told, everyone is crying SCAM right now – we think it is just clumsy marketing in combination with an unfortunate distribution of the free coins, by the help of the developed LCC wallet (which will need your private key). Good news for miners: you can search your old Bitcoin SHA256 mining hardware in the cellar and get ready for SHA256 Litecoin with fast transactions and minimal fees.

LitecoinCash seems to offer lots of advantages in comparison to other coins, like a target block time of 2.5 minutes and 90% cheaper transaction fees than Litecoin. Fast transactions & low fees? This is very lit of you, LitecoinCash. Even better if we can get our first coins for free. As firm believers & holders of Litecoin (which we see as a “slow-and-steady-grow-coin” to hold) we are excited that we will receive LiteCash in a 1:10 ratio, which means for every LTC we hold on the blockchain on the hard fork, we will receive 10 LCC for free.

Basic Information about LitecoinCash:

LitecoinCash can be mined with SHA256 mining hardware

Block Time of 2.5 minutes

90% cheaper than Litecoin

Replay attack protection for the hard fork

Hard fork comes with address prefix to prevent confusion and inter-chain issues.

Segwit & Lightning ready

The mining difficulty will be recalculated every block (as known from DASH)

Smooth and fair launch for miners

Maximum supply of 840 million

No real white paper yet

Ticker Symbol will be LCC

Official website: https://litecoinca.sh/

When will the Litecoin/LitecoinCash Hard Fork happen?

The fork will happen at block 1371111. The fork is expected for Monday, February 19, 2018. The current Litecoin Block can be seen here: https://live.blockcypher.com/ltc/

How to claim the free LitecoinCash coins?

Once the desktop wallets have been released, it will be quite easy to claim your free LCC, though it comes with a risk as the private key is needed. We would never encourage anyone to use your private key, therefore you will find a second alternate solution below, which is more safe.

Export your private key from your Litecoin Wallet. If you use the Exodus desktop wallet, you will have to hit CTRL + SHIFT + D to activate the dev menu at the top. You will find it then under Exodus -> Developer -> Assets -> Litecoin -> Export Private Keys. Download and install the LitecoinCash wallet for your system. This will be available here: https://litecoinca.sh/#download Import the private key under File -> Import Private Key Enjoy free LCCs If you had your LTC on an exchange you would have to mess around with their support to get your LitecoinCash credited.

How to minimize the risk when claiming LCC?

We would never recommend you to share your private keys anywhere. At this point of time, the LitecoinCash Team offers only this way of claiming on their website, but we could imagine that other options might come later. Despite the scam yelling everywhere, we chose to stay with the facts and don't think it is a scam as the code of the wallet will be open. If you want to go the extra safe way, please follow this steps:

Open a second Litecoin wallet. Transfer your LTC there and hold it until the hard fork block has passed. Transfer your LTC back to your original wallet, so the wallet from step 1 is empty again. Import the private key of the empty, temporary wallet into your LCC wallet.

Comment by Tanner, lead LCC dev on Reddit:

Hi. I'm Tanner, lead LCC dev. While I don't expect you to attach any weight to this post, I wanted to say that I hope when we open our code you'll be able to see that there's nothing amiss. We will stress at every point that you should absolutely move your coins into a fresh wallet before claiming any fork, and never paste private keys that are currently holding currency into ANYTHING. To be slightly more candid than elsewhere: It's true that the whole idea originated as a joke; an sha256 fork of Litecoin is patently ridiculous to anyone familiar with the history of LTC. However the more we thought about it, the more it made sense. We're big fans and supporters of LTC and Charlie Lee. Other alts have addressed LTC's main issue, which to my mind is difficulty adjustment. However they haven't combined that fix with fair distribution — ie, distributing to existing LTC holders. Combined with the fact that there's a lot of SHA256-specific hardware out there that isn't up to modern BTC difficulty targets, but doesn't have many worthwhile alternative options (beyond BCH) – suddenly the joke made sense. I don't claim that we're doing anything new yet. What we're trying to do is to present the best of everything that's gone before, distribute it fairly, and create a great currency for trading and day-to-day use.

Update: It is confirmed that this is not an official Litecoin Hard Fork. We don't think it is an actual scam, though. It is unfortunate that LitecoinCash needs the private key to claim (until now). Of course, Charlie Lee is not happy about the unauthorized use of his brand name for a hard fork his coin has nothing to do with. Despite his tweet, we don't see the usual red flags for a scam, but of course, it is always better to play safe. We honor the awareness of Charlie Lee to warn for such a case, even if this could have a negative influence on the price of LTC.

PSA: The Litecoin team and I are not forking Litecoin. Any forks that you hear about is a scam trying to confuse you to think it's related to Litecoin. Don't fall for it and definitely don't enter your private keys or seed into their website or client. Be careful out there! https://t.co/qXbiIxp5Al — Charlie Lee [LTC] (@SatoshiLite) 4. Februar 2018

The post by Charlie Lee might be a hit for the LCC – team as they often stated to be fans of him.

So, is Litecoin Cash a scam?

Right now, everyone is screaming SCAM – and frankly, this is understandable. However, let's get the facts straight and see what we have here:

The private key is needed (until now) to claim the coins.

As the LCC Team seems to consists of Litecoin fans, they used the brand name of this coin. In combination with all the hate Bitcoin Cash faces, the naming has been a bad marketing decision.

So it is basically these two things, which leads many people to yell “SCAM!” across the boards. We don't have any advantages to protect them, nor are we affiliated with LitecoinCash, though we think this is a bit thin. Miners and technically more versed confirmed that the concept itself makes sense. Without knowing the truth behind all of this, our take is that the LCC – team is a bunch of funny nerds, that had a good idea, developed out of an actual joke. Sometimes the flow works like this, you joke around, think a bit more about it in a serious way and then you say – hey, let's try that! Let's observe what the future brings and how this all develops.