The first and largest cryptocurrency by market cap. Bitcoin introduced the concept of a decentralised peer-to-peer electronic cash system secured by proof-of-work mining. It remains the dominant digital store of value.
Bitcoin Cash is a fork of Bitcoin that increased the block size to enable more transactions per second and lower fees. It emerged from the 2017 scaling debate and positions itself as the original vision of Bitcoin as peer-to-peer electronic cash.
Litecoin is one of the earliest Bitcoin forks, created by former Google engineer Charlie Lee. It processes transactions 4x faster than Bitcoin and uses the Scrypt hashing algorithm. Often called digital silver to Bitcoin's digital gold, it has one of the longest track records in crypto.