Another difference in the two currencies is in the mining of the coins. Mining is the use of processing power to run a block of coins, creating new virtual money. Bitcoin mining has become rather specialized, with high-yield rigs and special chips for mining.

Litecoin asserts users will be able to make a profit mining the currency with off-the-shelf personal computers, whereas BTC increasingly demands (and inspired the creation of) high-powered, customized mining rigs. Litecoin was designed to produce four times as many coins as Bitcoin by the end of its production life cycle—84 million. The mining rewards are 50 Litecoins, vs. Bitcoin’s original 25.

Litecoin was launched in October 2011 by Charles Lee, an MIT graduate who currently works at a major tech company. Lee, heads the Litecoin Development Team, a team of six spread across the United States, Canada, the U.K., and France.

Other active digital currencies include PPcoin, Ven, Terracoin, Feathercoin and Novacoin, in addition to context-bound currencies like Second Life’s Linden Dollars, Tencent’s QQ Coins and Facebook Credits.

At the intersection of open-source enthusiasm and crypto-currency there are, as one might imagine, a fair number of people running their own projects on the LTC platform. With time it could rival Bitcoin in the same way that Gmail rivals Outlook or Bing rivals Google.