Litecoin currency: the history and predictions for December 2017
Litecoin is one of the first altcoins in the circulation as it was created in October 2011. If you compare Litecoin vs Bitcoin, you will see that Litecoin has a very good potential. In this article I would like to tell my thoughts about Litecoin currency, what we can expect and why this is such a great digital coin to invest.
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The history of Litecoin currency
First let’s take a look back into the past.
Litecoin was created by Charlie Lee. The initial purpose of creating this alternative coin was to solve a lot of problems that Bitcoin had at that time.
What makes Litecoin different from Bitcoin? The core difference is the amount of block time. Litecoin’s block time is significantly shorter. Just to compare: Bitcoin block time is about 10 minutes, while Litecoin has about only 2,5. So when the digital currency was issued it allowed to confirm transactions on the network much faster and reduced the cost of transactions.
Also Litecoin was the first digital coin to use the script algorithm which is different from Bitcoin’s one, which was very important, especially back in 2011. At the time Bitcoin was gaining its popularity, and many people were using specialized mining hardware, which made it impossible to do at desktop PCs and left all the altcoins at significant disadvantage. Litecoin currency has implemented the script which allowed the coins to be mined on desktops.
Litecoin is a fork of Bitcoin, s all the mechanisms that were originally used in Bitcoin are present at Litecoin as well. But Litecoin is much more flexible and adopts new technologies much faster. This is because Bitcoin has a much bigger network of miners and there is much more money involved, there is real resistance to upgrade the network due to the fear of cutting into another person’s territory. So Litecoin is much more eager to implement new technologies and it is always one step ahead of Bitcoin.
Undoubtedly, this situation is going to continue in the future. Both digital currencies will be facing the same range of problems, but Litecoin will always be the first one to implement new tweaks to solve them.
Bitcoin vs Litecoin
There is a distinct possibility that the Bitcoin could flow Litecoin’s growth. If Bitcoin implements Lightning Network correctly and sees its confirmation time drop together with the transaction fees, then it could beat Litecoin in the long perspective. But the chances for this are really small. There are many interesting technologies, and the way that you think they would be implemented does not always correspond with the reality.
Certainly Bitcoin will be implementing new technologies to meet its customers’ needs. One of the biggest steps in the cryptocurrency market is smart contracts. This is one of the reasons why Ethereum is taking a lot of volume away from Bitcoin and why it has become the world’s 2nd largest cryptocurrency.
When Bitcoin was initially launched, nobody could even imagine such a thing as smart contracts. Later, when the technology gained popularity, a few Solutions have been proposed on how to implement it with old digital coins like Bitcoin and Litecoin. Currently there is only one solution how to enable Smart contracts on Bitcoin, so eventually it’s going to find a way to reduce its transaction and confirmation time.
But if we look at it from the broader perspective, we will see Litecoin still continues to be more innovative and implements new technologies faster than Bitcoin. This digital currency remains an undoubted leader of technology and that’s what it’s going to remain.
Current Litecoin price and capitalization
If we take a look at coinmarketcap.com, we will see that Litecoin is the world’s 5th largest cryptocurrency as its market cap of almost $3 billion, while Bitcoin remains at the first line with the capitalization of $125 billion.
If we take a look at the Litecoin’s price chart for the whole time, we will see that it had the same level of growth in 2013, just like Bitcoin. At taht time Litecoin price shot from $2 to $50. Now the pattern repeats again.
So Litecoin price follows Bitcoin price closely. As long as Bitcoin keeps doing well, so will Litecoin. Perhaps it will not grow so much in the nearest couple of months. But on a long run, one year for example, Litecoin may do even better, because it has such a good potential with implementing new technologies.
Litecoin exchange rate
If you want to exchange Litecoin to USD, you can always take a look at Litecoin exchange rate at bestrate.org.
This is the platform that allows you to instantly exchange Litecoin for any other digital currency you want without any third party.
