Steemit Crypto Academy | Season 2: Altcoins – Part1 "Looking beyond the Bitcoin" | for @hochiminhrm

Greetings to professor @yohan2on for this new lesson in the cryptoacademy, always seeking to transmit his knowledge of this great world of cryptocurrencies and this week we have to talk about altcoins.

_{photo of my authorship made in Canva}

ALTCOIN

After the arrival of bitcoin in 2009, marking a world revolution and opening a new path, which is this world of crypto assets brought many things with it. In search of covering the limitations or disadvantages of bitcoin, other cryptocurrencies called altcoin were born.

Altcoin can be quickly defined as the entire set of cryptocurrencies that are not bitcoin, that is, every cryptocurrency that is not bitcoin is an altcoin. At present we can have more than 5000 altcoins, all with unique characteristics that make them different from the others and each with its peculiarity in search of attracting the attention of investors.

Altcoins come to offer a bit more security to investors since compared to bitcoin with its volatility is much lower, as well as its mining system since that of bitcoin is usually expensive for its necessary equipment and usually takes longer to differences of many altcoins that their requirements are much lower and their extraction takes much less time.

fountain

LITECOIN

Litecoin is a cryptocurrency that was created in 2011 with the intention of exploiting the attributes of blockchain technology. Busca offers greater efficiency and security at a much lower limit, it is based on the same bitcoin protocol, but with a different algorithm (hashing algorithm).

This altcoin uses P2P technology that allows it to operate without a central influence or authority, the management of its transactions is executed globally by the network. Litecoin was thought to be an alternative to bitcoin and many consider it the better brother looking to lean on the strengths of bitcoin and seeking to solve its limitations.

Litecoin

Function

The little brother of bitcoin, came to provide transactions (sending or receiving money) at low cost and providing a high level of security to its users. This currency can be traded on the main exchanges such as Binance, OKEx, FTX, Houbi, Kraken among others.

It is highly demanded by digital money users since in the most important and secure wallets they can protect their currency and then be able to trade them quite easily and safely, which has made it position itself among the top 10 according to the list of _{coinmarketcap}

fountain

Characteristics

Litecoin is considered the silver currency, as we can assume the golden currency is bitcoin, this cryptocurrency allows us to carry out transactions much faster since it processes each block in only 2.5 minutes. Its open source system allows it to be easily audited and giving security and transparency to its functionality.

It contains a script function in its algorithm (proof of work) which makes mining much easier since it does not require very expensive and sophisticated equipment. Another thing that characterizes this coin is the amount of coins in circulation (84 million coins), comparing it with bitcoin, it is 4 times more coins.

fountain

MINING

In this case, Litecoin uses the same algorithm that bitcoin uses (Proof to Work), only that said algorithm was not applied in the same way since it was thought that bitcoin (Sha-256) consumed a lot of electrical service and expensive equipment.

Faced with this limitation, the litecoin developers based their algorithm on script, which requires much less energy and less power, but does require greater memory capacity.

fountain

Pros

• Its open source litecoin core system allows an easy and fast audit giving it total transparency and security

• Its speed, litecoin can generate blocks every 2.5 minutes which reduces the time of validation of operations.

• Its decentralization, this means that each user has the freedom and power to make decisions.

• Low volatility, which offers greater security to investors.

Cons

Despite the aforementioned advantages, we can observe a couple of limitations in the currency.

• Although it uses much less energy than bitcoin, the amount of electrical flow required is still considerable.

• Its scalability, although it can carry out more transactions per second than bitcoin, its 56 transactions per second limit it to be the ideal payment method.

fountain

Conclution

The altcoin came to improve the limitations that bitcoin exposed thus giving more benefits and security to investors, each one is distinguished by its characteristic quality which can vary according to its objective and function.

The little brother of bitcoin since they share many similarities, I try to collect all the positive things about bitcoin and improve or find solutions to the negative ones, achieving this to a great extent, although with various limitations, they are still looking to continue solving to try to give it better fight the market giant.