Get the weekly summary of crypto market analysis, news, and forecasts! This Week’s Summary The crypto market ends the week at a total market capitalization of $2,17 trillion. Bitcoin continues to trade at around $62,300. Ethereum experiences no changes and stagnates at around $2,400. XRP is down by 2%, Solana by 1%, and Dogecoin by 3%. Almost all altcoins are trading in the red, with very few exceptions. The DeFi sector decreased the total value of protocols (TVL) to around…
When it was first released in 2011, Litecoin was deemed by its creators as the “future of commerce.” Since then, the cryptocurrency that lets you instantly send money anywhere in the world has had a spectacular evolution to become the 6th most valuable crypto in the world and stay true to its foretold success.
While some consider Litecoin to be nothing more than the “silver” to Bitcoin’s “gold,” this crypto’s evolution has successfully proven that it is more than just a sidekick of the most famous digital asset in the world.
With a global market value that exceeds $4.8 billion, Litecoin is more than just the Robin to Bitcoin’s Batman in the cryptocurrency Universe, where it steadily establishes itself as a stand-alone crypto superhero.
Litecoin in a Nutshell
- Litecoin is a decentralized online currency
- Litecoin was initially issued in 2011
- Litecoin uses blockchain technology
- Litecoin enables you to make payments with minimal costs or no fees at all
- Litecoin money transfers cannot suffer chargebacks
- Litecoin can be stored safely on your computer or your smartphone
- Litecoin exists in a limited amount of 84 million units
- Litecoin can be traded for fiat currencies and vice-versa through secure online exchanges
- Litecoin can be traded for other cryptos through cross-chain atomic swaps
- Litecoin has countless uses and endless potential for development
What is Litecoin?
Litecoin follows in the footsteps of its online currency predecessors and competitors like Bitcoin, Ethereum and Ripple to offer users easy and safe virtual payments worldwide.
Litecoin appeared as a spin-off from Bitcoin and has a nearly identical working process to the most famous cryptocurrency.
Litecoin works as a decentralized online currency that uses secure software and blockchain technology to enable you to send and receive payments instantly and as quickly as writing a text message.
You can use Litecoin to purchase services or pay for goods online at merchants that accept it as a form of payment.
The best part of using this crypto is its ability to transfer money with lightning speed. One of its most notable achievements is the transfer of 0.00000001 LTC from Zürich to San Francisco in barely one second in 2017. The event is a significant breakthrough for blockchain technology and a turning point in the history of peer-to-peer cryptocurrency.
A brief history of Litecoin
The Litecoin founder is Charlie Lee, a former Google employee that released the cryptocurrency in 2011.
He created a Bitcoin fork and modified some key components to reduce the time necessary for block generating from 10 minutes to only 2.5 minutes. In addition, by changing the hash algorithm to Scrypt from SHA-256, the system enhanced the number of coins created in this given time.
It wasn’t until 2013 that Litecoin gained significant publicity and recognition in the crypto industry. During November of that year, its aggregate value soared significantly, achieving a 100% surge in less than 24 hours.
Four years later, Litecoin was the first big-name cryptocurrency to adopt Segregated Witness (SegWit), a soft fork change in the ledger that prevents non-intentional transactions and allows optional data transmission.
By the end of 2017, Charlie Lee had gained over 370.000 followers on Twitter and was already a key influencer in the crypto community. However, at that time, he announced via a Reddit post that he would sell all of his Litecoins due to conflicts of interest.
In 2018, Litecoin developers announced the release of Litepay, which was hyped as an alternative to Bitpay and the payment processor through which retailers and users could accept Litecoin transactions anywhere in the world. Unfortunately, the entire project collapsed, and even Charlie Lee apologized for the failure.
How does Litecoin work?
Similarly to Bitcoin, Litecoin uses blockchain technology to sustain a high volume of transactions in an incredibly shorter amount of time.
As open-source software, Litecoin works through the independent verification of binaries and their analogous source code, also known as “mining.” Whenever a transaction occurs, its verification is processed across a network of high-performance computers that collectively confirm its authenticity, better known as “proof of work.”
Contrary to Bitcoin, Litecoin uses a different algorithm called Scrypt, which supports enhanced processing from parallel mining sources. Its benefits include:
- Increased access for new miners
- More enormous rewards for mining computers (25 Litecoins per block)
- Quicker processing than through the SHA-256 algorithm
- Faster confirmation times
- More suitable for merchants and other end-users
- Easily affordable to mine for regular users
What are the differences between Litecoin and Bitcoin?
Litecoin is a direct competitor of Bitcoin, but each achievement that marks its progress is another step ahead for the most popular crypto in the world, too. Moreover, since they both use a very similar working process, they benefit from each other’s development.
Still, there are a few significant differences between Litecoin and Bitcoin.
First, Litecoin has already achieved its primary goal of being faster and more efficient than Bitcoin. Its mining process, the implementation of SegWit, and the Lightning Network have helped it handle and secure a higher volume of transactions in a shorter period.
Litecoin emphasizes using cross-chain atomic swaps, enabling users to trade cryptos without needing trusted exchange. Instead, they can do so through a simple, smart contract.
Litecoin learned from Bitcoin’s flood attack of 2015 and patched its network to make it immune to such potentially destructive forces. But, unfortunately, it did so by making the attacks as economically unprofitable as possible for the hackers.
Litecoin is more efficient than Bitcoin, and its network can uphold the development of 4 times more coins. Moreover, while Bitcoin can never exceed a cap of 21 million coins, Litecoin is programmed to touch the ceiling of an 84 million cap.
How to mine Litecoin
When mining Litecoin, one of the significant disparities between this crypto and Bitcoin comes into play. While both use a blockchain and miners to solve complex cryptographic puzzles, how they go about it is different.
Bitcoin uses application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs) and the SHA-256 hashing algorithm to mine new blocks of Bitcoins and confirm transactions. Users often combine their powers to complete mining faster and more efficiently in conglomerate ASIC systems called “mining pools.”
Within a mining pool, the miners use parallelization to solve the puzzles they receive. Unfortunately, this means that they commit a significant amount of energy to untangle the problems simultaneously, which may become a waste of power in the long run.
Litecoin adopts an easier and more accessible mining process. Instead of using parallelization, Litecoin miners solve problems in continuing order, one by one.
This way, they do not need to become part of a mining pool and do not waste energy. Furthermore, the relatively small amount of required power enables regular users to mine cryptos on decent-performance computers.
How to buy and own Litecoin
You can easily use trusted exchanges to trade fiat currency for Litecoins if you want to own some but are not able or wish to mine them.
On websites like Coinbase, you can buy or sell Litecoin for dollars, euros, and other currencies quickly and safely. Other secure exchanges include Binance, Kraken, and BTCC.
At the time of writing, the value of Litecoin on CoinMarketCap was $73.29.
You can safely exchange other fiat payment methods to purchase Litecoins, such as USD, EUR, or RUB.
Btc
Bitcoin
$62.547
price
price
0.84959%
price change
Additionally, you can own Litecoin if you create an online wallet and accept payment in Litecoins for various services.
Where to store Litecoin
- You can safely store Litecoin in conventional cryptocurrency wallets, including:
- Litecoin Wallets – Crypto wallets for PC, MAC, Linux, iOS, and Android-running devices
- Hardware Wallets – USB sticks modified to support blockchain technology, such as Ellipal, Ledger or Trezor
- Desktop Wallets – Hot wallets/applications that you can download and install on your PC. like the Atomic Wallet
- Mobile Wallets – Apps that you can download and install on your phone, like Coinomi, Jaxx or Mycelium
- Paper Wallets – Printed proof of your private keys that you can store in a safe place
The Advantages of Using Litecoin
- At 2 minutes and 30 seconds per transaction, Litecoin is way faster and more efficient than Bitcoin, which may take up to 10 minutes to complete the same operation.
- Litecoin is immune to flood attacks.
- You can easily mine Litecoins on an average-performance computer. You do not need an ASICS machine, as with Bitcoin.
- Litecoin transfers involve lower transaction fees than credit card companies and banks.
- With Litecoin, you can instantly send money anywhere in the world to anyone.
- Litecoin can be traded for both fiat currencies and other cryptocurrencies
The Risks of Investing in Litecoin
- The loss or misplacement of your private keys will mean the complete loss of all your Litecoins
- Software problems may cause corrupted wallet files and unsafe cryptographic libraries.
- Damage to your hardware wallet will result in losing your entire Litecoin library.
- Future developments of Litecoin may have the same disappointing fate as Litepay did.
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