Steemit Crypto Academy//Introduction to Altcoins//Submitted to @yohan2on

Weldone @yohan2on, your lecture was quite tentative and very precise.

Evolution of Altcoins
Cryptocurrency discussions cannot be totally complete without mentioning Altcoins. They are alternative coins to mother Bitcoin. The adoption we experience today in cryptocurrency is as a result of various alternative coins that has been introduced into the cryptocurrency ecosystem. Each and every one of this altcoins claims they are solving one problem or the other and most times we believe they do.

Altcoins makes trading cryptocurrency trading interesting but they experience severe fluctuations at times. Bitcoin being the first ever Cryptocurrency was discovered to have some disadvantages which needed attention, so altcoins were introduced. Litecoin is one of those.

source

What is Litecoin
Litecoin is a permissionless, peer to peer cryptocurrency created by a former goggle employee Charles Lee in 2011. LTC as it usually abbreviated, was found to have similar properties with Bitcoin. To start with, LTC was introduced to handle difficulties discovered in Bitcoin. These difficulties experienced with Bitcoin were:

1)Transaction Speed
2)High cost of transaction fees
3)Small Total supply
4)Increase in mining difficulties

These and many others were hindrances that could foster cryptocurrency adoption. LTC was introduced to handle all this.

As a matter of fact, the creator calls it a 'lighter version of Bitcoin' and can perform better than bitcoin, no wonder it was called Lite coin.source

In terms of speed, LTC was discovered to be very fast, it is can process transactions 4 times faster than bitcoin. Quite fast I guess. This inturn reduce the high transaction fees encountered when transaction with Bitcoin. Scalability issues were taken care of.

Another interesting aspect of the solution introduces by LTC is the problem of supply, Bitcoin had a small supply of which all are not even distributed. It is said to have a total supply of 21 million coins but Litecoin's introduction came with 4 times BTC total supply, making it 84 million.

Mining difficulties with BTC kept on increasing due to its SHA-2560 hashing alogaritm whereas Litecoin uses the Scrypt hashing alogaritm. Options are limited as this is the way new BTC coins are created, as more transactions are processed and more blocks created the mathematics gets harder. Another problem is the equipment needed to mine bitcoin which was just too expensive to acquire but Litecoin's creation changed a whole lot as provisions where made for anyone to mine Litecoin, no large equipments needed.

Litecoin can be mined using Graphic Processing Units (GPU), Bitcoin uses about 10 minutes to mine a block while LTC uses just about 2.5 minutes.

Pro and Cons of Litecoin
Litecoin transactions are fast and less expensive
It can easily be mined
It's scalable
It is decentralized

For the cons, Litecoin is not popular as bitcoin which pose a problem of acceptance. This can even be seen in the huge difference in market capitalization.

Conclusion
In conclusion, Litecoin happens to be a very promising altcoins having described itself as the lighter version of bitcoin, solving problems encountered with Bitcoin but there has been serious introduction of more alternatives coins giving rise to serious competition. It might be a good investment package though.

Thank you Prof. For the time.