101 Guide to Litecoin
As more and more people are embracing the world of cryptocurrency, people are looking for investment opportunities outside of Bitcoin and Ethereum. While Bitcoin is seen as “gold” and a store of value for long-term purposes, Litecoin is seen as the “silver” and a mean of a cheaper transaction. Litecoin clearly looks like an alternative choice.
What is Litecoin?
Litecoin is an open source, low-cost decentralized cryptocurrency that is used to make payment globally.
The Origins Of Litecoin
Litecoin is created by Charlie Lee, an ex-Google employee who had the vision to create a lighter version of Bitcoin while he was still working for Google. Charlie worked on some notable projects such as Google Play Games, Chrome OS, and YouTube during his time with Google. Lee worked for Coinbase full-time before leaving to work full-time on Litecoin.
Litecoin was released via an open-source client on GitHub on 7 October 2011 and went live on 13 October 2011. It is basically a fork of the Bitcoin Core client.
How to Buy Litecoin?
Litecoin is one of the most popular cryptocurrencies out there and thus it is available on pretty much any crypto exchange. Check out Tokenize Xchange where you can buy crypto using fiats such as SGD and MYR.
How to Store Litecoin?
There are various Litecoin wallets available for free that you can download to store your coins. Windows, Mac OS X, iOS, Linux, Android and Blackberry are all supported operating systems. In addition to these “standard” wallets, Litecoin has a few other options such as Electrum LTC, LiteVault and LiteAddress. Links to each wallet can be found on the Litecoin website.
Why Litecoin? And How is Litecoin Different from Bitcoin?
Six things make Litecoin different:
- Speed
Litecoin generates blocks about four times faster than bitcoin, thus it can confirm the legitimacy of transactions a lot quicker. You will receive money sent via Litecoin within a few minutes, while with Bitcoin this can potentially take up to 10 to 15 minutes.
- Transaction Volume
Litecoin is better at processing high transaction volume, something that has been a major problem for Bitcoin and Ethereum.
- Transaction Fees
The longer the block, the more you have to pay the miners for the transactions. Litecoin has smaller blocks than Bitcoin, hence lower fees.
- Number of Coins
There will be a total of 84 million Litecoins in total supply, which is four times more than Bitcoin which has a limit of 21 million coins.
- Market Cap
Although Litecoin’s market cap pales in comparison to Bitcoin and Ethereum, Litecoin still ranks among the top 5 cryptocurrencies to date.
- Coin Mining
Bitcoin uses SHA-256 which is considered to be relatively more complex, while Litecoin uses a memory-intensive algorithm referred to as scrypt. Different proof-of-work algorithms mean you need to use different mining rig when mining due to different specifications of hardware.
The Growth of Litecoin
In 2017, the price of Litecoin has increased by 7,291%! In comparison, bitcoin “only” increased by 1731%.
On December 18th 2017, Litecoin reached its all-time high, $360.93, which, when compared to the price one year before ($4.40), was an incredible 8200% rise. This is wholly reflective of a booming cryptocurrency marketplace, whose total market cap ballooned from $17.7bn to around $650bn in just one year, an increase of over 3,600%.
The Future of Litecoin
Litecoin has all of the functionality of Bitcoin with notable improvements. While it hasn’t received all of the press and hype of Bitcoin or Ethereum, Litecoin has all the ingredients to become one of the world’s standard currencies once cryptocurrencies become widely adopted in the future.
