Litecoin: What you need to know!
What is Litecoin?
“Litecoin is a peer-to-peer Internet currency that enables instant, near-zero cost payments to anyone in the world. Litecoin is an open source, global payment network that is fully decentralized without any central authorities. Mathematics secures the network and empowers individuals to control their own finances. Litecoin features faster transaction confirmation times and improved storage efficiency than the leading math-based currency. With substantial industry support, trade volume and liquidity, Litecoin is a proven medium of commerce complementary to Bitcoin.” Source
History of Litecoin
Litecoin was released via an open-source client on GitHub on October 7, 2011 by Charlie Lee, a former Google employee.
Litecoin was created with the intent of becoming “silver to bitcoin’s gold”
“Litecoin is the result of some of us who joined together on IRC in an effort to create a real alternative currency similar to Bitcoin. We wanted to make a coin that is silver to Bitcoin's gold. Various alternative currencies have come and gone. Some brought innovation, but they all had problems.” Source
Charlie Lee, also known as coblee or SatoshiLite is currently the Director of Engineering at the popular digital asset company Coinbase.
Lee is also the managing director of the Litecoin Foundation.
“The Litecoin Foundation (Litecoin Foundation Ltd.) is a non-profit organization (Company Limited by Guarantee without shareholders) registered in Singapore (Unique Entity Number 201709179W). Its mission is to advance Litecoin for the good of society by developing and promoting state-of-the-art blockchain technologies.” Source
How is Litecoin Different From Bitcoin
- The Litecoin Network aims to process a block every 2.5 minutes, rather than Bitcoin's 10 minutes, which its developers claim allows for faster transaction confirmation.
- Litecoin uses scrypt in its proof-of-work algorithm
- The Litecoin Network will produce 84 million Litecoins, or four times as many currency units as will be issued by the Bitcoin Network.
Developments
In a 2013 interview for Coindesk.com, Lee makes a now prophetic statement.
“The bitcoin market is worth $2bn, so they don't want to make any big changes that could lose them a lot of money. We are able to take more risk. Our community is smaller, so it's easier for us to convince a large proportion of people to upgrade.” It’s harder for Bitcoin miners to do that, he points out.
“There are a lot of things that require a hard fork and Bitcoin is wary of that,” he explains. Consequently, the Bitcoin developers sometimes talk to the Litecoin team to see if it will consider an experimental feature for its altcoin, if they are unwilling to take the risk. Source
This in fact has come to pass, Litecoin successfully activated SegWit in May 2017.
Another notable development that occurred today is the Litecoin Foundation announced “After years, the Litecoin team finally got a full-time developer.”
Why You Should Care
Now that Litecoin has successfully activated SegWit they are now able to introduce Lightning Network. The Lightning Network, if implemented could make the following changes.
Instant Payments. Lightning-fast blockchain payments without worrying about block confirmation times. Security is enforced by blockchain smart-contracts without creating a on-blockchain transaction for individual payments. Payment speed measured in milliseconds to seconds.
Scalability. Capable of millions to billions of transactions per second across the network. Capacity blows away legacy payment rails by many orders of magnitude. Attaching payment per action/click is now possible without custodians.
Low Cost. By transacting and settling off-blockchain, the Lightning Network allows for exceptionally low fees, which allows for emerging use cases such as instant micropayments.
Cross Blockchains. Cross-chain atomic swaps can occur off-chain instantly with heterogeneous blockchain consensus rules. So long as the chains can support the same cryptographic hash function, it is possible to make transactions across blockchains without trust in 3rd party custodians.
Litecoin could very well be the testing ground for future changes in Bitcoin. At the moment, while the Bitcoin scaling debate remains unresolved, Litecoin is taking advantage of the opportunity. Several Companies who used BTC for payroll or transactions may now switch over to Litecoin.
More on that soon...
Also, be sure to check out my recent article about the relationship between Bitcoin, Litecoin and Gold and Silver.
If you are interested in buying BTC,LTC or ETH check out Coinbase, you will get $10 of free BTC after your first $100 BTC purchase, using the link below.
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Nice article :) I like how you describe Litecoin to new users :) But I don't think that Litecoin will raise as much as Bitcoin. Maybe Litecoin will never be worth 100$ per Litecoin. But only the future can tell us the truth.
I don't think your statement holds true, why do you say that it can never be 100$
I don't have said that this is a fact. I just said that I think it won't raise more than 100$
Maybe I'm false and need to invest in Litecoin 😂
But if you look in the Litecoin chart you will see that we had a peek in 2013.
Source
After that peek litecoin hasn't got a newer top value.
I really don't feel that way, if we go back in time in 2013, did we ever knew that a single bitcoin could even touch 2600$, I don't think so. Or even ETH
We can never do 100% prediction in bitcoin market. I feel if there is going to be increase in market cap than LTC has very high potential to hit 100$.
I understand and respect your opinion :)
But I for me and only me have decided that I never will invest a huge amount of money to Litecoin. Maybe it because I can't afford it or I can't believe that Litecoin will grow higher than bitcoin.
I hope you also can respect my opinion. :)
I also respect your opinion, just in case we both are active and in good health, I will keep this post in my quote list :)
Reference may be :)
Cheers
I enjoy seeing positive and respectful discussion in the comments! :)
Cheers, crypo is in babies currently and it is just the beginning :)
Thank you! As I point out in the article, Litecoin was never intended to replace or out do Bitcoin, it was created with the intent of being a complimentary system, hence the gold silver comparison.
What is very interesting about the relationship between BTC and LTC is the ability for experimentation with changes in LTC before implementing them on BTC. It allows for testing without interrupting the larger BTC network.
That is true :) Since some days I speak with a few persons on my university and everytime they here about cryptos they think somebody wants to make money. So Litecoin is more the stable one and doesn't give the owner of Litecoins the option to make money. Have I understood your article right ?
What's this? A LTC bio with no mention of Tenebrix? Here's a history lesson about the original scrypt coin that LTC was forked from.
https://steemit.com/cryptocurrency/@junglist/tales-from-the-cryptocrypt-tenebrix-the-original-scryptcoin
I just wanted to focus on LTC to avoid confusing people, but thank you for the tip and the link. I started to skim your article but will read through it later when I have more time, looks interesting! Thanks for reading and for contributing to the discussion! I am glad to see Steemians interested in LTC!
I realy dissappointed about litecoin, lighting network, segwitch,... but i still hope, i love LTC, i bought 45 LTC at 23$, i believe Charlie Lee will make LTC better, LTC useful. LTC is not shadow of Bitcoin. I'llcry when LTC down 😂. Thanks
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Thanks for this article. I was just taking a second look at Litecoin, and I think its value may be underrated. It's certainly positioned as the transactional medium of exchange, rather that the longer term store of value. This fact alone may keep a lid on Litecoin's value because the tendency will be to hold enough Litecoin to meet transactional needs, and not much more. That said, its flexibility and technical strengths are intriguing. Remains to be seen, but I'll hold some because it seems underpriced and unloved - my favorite type of asset.
I don't know how the coin will perform from an investment stand point, but LTC and the developments on the network are important for the crypto world and something I will be watching closely.
Litecoin is certainly a superior coin. It's faster than Bitcoin and has less transaction fees.
The both have their pros and cons, as I have said before as long as btc has issues with scaling and high transaction fees LTC has the edge, however I don't think necessarily that one has to fail for the other to succeed.
Great article. And a good explanation of what the Lightning network can provide. Now I just have to understand how it is able to achieve it.
Thanks! Maybe, I will do a post breaking down how it works if I can find the time. Thanks for reading!
BEWARE....and be careful!
cryptos are taking over the world
This is just the beginning....
exactly