Litecoin is a distributed blockchain that is verified by all the full nodes in the Litecoin Network. Full nodes all agree to enforce a similar set of rules so as to maintain a unified version of the Litecoin "ledger." As miners successfully add a block (or record of transactions) to the Litecoin blockchain, full nodes disseminate this information to other full nodes in the network so that everyone has a copy. This is how the blockchain ledger remains unified and how everyone is held accountable.

What Kind of Rules Are There for Litecoin?

Here are some examples that Litecoin full nodes currently enforce:

1 mb blocks Scrypt Mining Algorithm 2.5 minute transaction times 84 million max supply

Now let's pretend for a moment that two alternate versions of the blockchain network exist at the same time in the Litecoin Network. How does this get resolved?

Well the first step is that miners must choose which version of the blockchain they want to extend. Miners are incentivized to build on the same version because if they don't, they won't get their block rewards. After miners choose a chain, the other full nodes in the Litecoin network collectively work together to select which of the two versions is the "real" Litecoin blockchain. This is typically determined by following the rule of the "longest chain," or the version of the Litecoin blockchain that is extended the fastest. As a side note, this isn't the only way to determine consensus.

The result of choosing one chain over the alternate version means that the other chain eventually dies because miners no longer submit their blocks to that chain. Eventually, the full nodes that downloaded the dead versions of the blockchain delete them and download the chain with consensus.

It is in this way that should anyone try to introduce an alternate version of the blockchain to the Litecoin network, they will be ignored or deleted because it won't be coherent with the unified blockchain ledger in the network.

But How Are Different Versions of the Blockchain Introduced?

There are two primary ways different versions of the Litecoin blockchain are introduced:

When miners successfully block at the same time thereby creating two or more simultaneous versions of the blockchain. The full nodes in the Litecoin network must now work together to select one version of the blockchain over the others. This is often referred to as a

"Chain Split." When new protocols, or rules, are introduced into the Litecoin network through full nodes.

For the purposes of this article, we will be focusing only on the second way which can be further categorized as Hard Forks and Soft Forks.