Nowadays practically everyone has heard of cryptocurrencies, even when it is a controversial or incomprehensible topic for many, and even sometimes treated as taboo, however, we are all to some extent familiar with this digital medium of exchange. But, have you ever wondered when and why did cryptocurrencies emerge?

In 2008, just over a decade ago, the entire planet was going through a financial crisis as a result of the collapse of the "housing bubble" in the United States, however, its effects reached the rest of the countries.

The problems of national currencies were becoming more apparent than ever, including the devaluation of the US dollar. Fearing that another scenario would present itself like the one that followed the collapse of the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) in October 1929, which would give rise to one of the darkest episodes in contemporary history known as the "Great Depression", some of the most renowned economists pointed to the need for a solution from a single centralized bank. In this sense, to seek to unblock the situation of financial markets, governments around the world made the decision to print more money to provide economies with more cash.

The cuts in interest rates and the low values ​​of the currencies, caused problems in the banks, and the governments had no choice but to rescue them with taxpayers' money. As a result, there was an even stronger devaluation, and the lesson still holds: central banks have the ability to manipulate currencies at will.

In the midst of this context, an enigmatic character emerges identified with the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto, who sends a message to a cryptography mailing list describing a project to create a digital currency that serves to account for and transfer value. Months later, it provides the necessary software to carry out these operations, thus creating Bitcoin, the first cryptocurrency in history.

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What are Altcoins?

Altcoin is a term that comes from the union of the words "alternative" and "coin", and is used to refer to all those cryptocurrencies that emerged after the appearance of Bitcoin in 2009.

The first altcoin to hit the market was Namecoin, based on the open source code of Bitcoin and using the same Proof of Work (PoW) algorithm, and like its predecessor, it is limited to 21 million coins.

Introduced in April 2011, Namecoin mainly differs from Bitcoin by making user domains less visible. Namecoin allowed users to sign up and mine using their own .bit domains, which was intended to increase anonymity and resistance to censorship.

Currently there is a wide variety of altcoins in the cryptocurrency ecosystem, which pursue various objectives through the implementation of various technical solutions to the problems that are proposed to be solved. Some of them use mining systems other than Bitcoin, being able to implement variants of the Proof of Work (PoW) algorithm or alternative systems based on Proof of Stake (PoS), among others.

Proof of Work and Proof of Stake are "consensus mechanisms" required to confirm transactions that take place on a blockchain, without the involvement of a third party.

How was Litecoin born?

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Going online on October 2011 with the launch of the open source client on GitHub, Litecoin is one of the first alternative currencies to Bitcoin to be created, after Namecoin.

Its abbreviation is LTC and it was designed using the open source code of Bitcoin to be an alternative to it, for transfers of low amounts. Each Litecoin is divided into 100,000,000 smaller units, defined by eight decimal places.

At times, this project has been branded by some media outlets as an alternative to Bitcoin with lower transaction fees, as have other altcoins such as Dash and Bitcoin Cash.

It is considered the "silver coin" of the cryptocurrency ecosystem, while Bitcoin is "gold". Litecoin is one of the most important currencies on the market, both for its capitalization and for its contribution to the blockchain network.

Litecoin was not raised, at least initially, to compete against Bitcoin. In fact, their goal was to create a currency that had the same benefits as Bitcoin but not its problems, seeking to shorten transaction times.

Its initial value in 2011 when it went on the market was $ 0.30. In the last 24 hours, its price has oscillated between a minimum of USD 238.34 and a maximum of USD 329.69, with an average value of around USD 260.00 with a market capitalization of USD 17,379,103,611.73 and with 66,752,415 LTC in circulation, occupying the position number 9 in the ranking of Coin Market Cap. Its maximum historical value of USD 375 reached it on December 19, 2017.

Screenshot edited with PicsArt

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Who was the creator of Litecoin?

Unlike Bitcoin where the true identity of its creator Satoshi Nakamoto is unknown, and it has even been speculated that it could not be an individual, but a group of people; in Litecoin the identity of its creator and promoter is public and notorious.

Charlie Lee, who earned a master's degree in computer science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), is the creator of Litecoin and current manager of the Litecoin Foundation.

Lee was born on April 13 of a year so far undetermined by his apparent aversion to disclosing the date.

At the age of 13, he migrated with his family from his native Ivory Coast in West Africa to the United States, graduating from high school at Lawrence School in New Jersey in 1995.

After obtaining his undergraduate degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2000, Lee worked at the companies Kana Communications and Guidewire Software, until he came to Google, where he remained from 2007 to 2013, contributing to the programming of Chrome, YouTube Mobile and Play Games.

After leaving Google, he came to Coinbase before the renowned exchange adopted the cryptocurrency he had created.

On October 9, 2011, Lee published the Litecoin proposal in the Bitcointalk forum, being "a project that replicated in a more or less identical way to the Bitcoin protocol", although he stated that he did not try to compete with it but rather allow Litecoin to be used to perform smaller and faster transactions. The project was made public once the first 150 LTC units were mined.

Differences between Bitcoin and Litecoin

Bitcoin vs. Litecoin

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Despite being almost identical to Bitcoin in its technical aspects, the Litecoin network differs from it due to changes in some variables such as:

• Processes a block every 2.5 minutes on average, instead of every 10 minutes, allowing a shorter wait for transaction confirmation.

• Will produce about 4 times more units than Bitcoin, around 84 million units in contrast to 21 million units of Bitcoin.

• It uses the scrypt function in its Proof of Work (PoW) algorithm unlike Bitcoin that uses SHA-256. This is a sequential function first conceived by Colin Percival, facilitating mining, since it does not need highly sophisticated and expensive equipment as in the case of Bitcoin.

• The reduction of the miners' reward in half, an automated process known as "halving" that seeks to reduce the issuance of a cryptocurrency, occurs every 840,000 blocks in Litecoin, while in Bitcoin it occurs every 210,000.

• The creator of Litecoin, Charlie Lee, is a notorious public figure, unlike Bitcoin where the true identity of its creator or creators is unknown.

Despite their differences, these two cryptocoins have some elements in common, beyond the technical aspect. First of all, they work on the principle of distributed ledgers or blockchain technology. Even though since their creation, each one has pursued different objectives, all of them enable transparent, private, and secure person-to-person payment mechanisms.

They also agree that they enable global transactions without the need for permission or supervision from an entity or government to be able to use them.

Volatility is another characteristic that these two cryptocurrencies share; a factor that for many has influenced their trend of widespread use as financial investment mechanisms and not so much as payment alternatives.

This is my homework task corresponding to the Steemit Crypto Academy | Season 2: Altcoins - Part1 "Looking beyond the Bitcoin" by Professor @yohan2on

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