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

Am delighted to be part of your class once again @yohan2on.

Introduction
Cryptocurrency market recognizes bitcoin as the mother of all cryptos. After bitcoin was introduced, intrest in cryptocurrency began reducing until the introduction of Altcoins. Altcoins are alternative coins to Bitcoin, or they are cryptocurrency aside from bitcoin. The massive involvement in cryptocurrency today is as a result of the introduction of ALTCOINS. As stated in the Lectures bitcoin could not have been able to catch up with its ever growing investors due to some setbacks such as transactions speed and cost, small supply of tokens among others hence the need for Altcoin. One of the altcoins introduced after bitcoin is the LITECOIN.

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What is Litecoin
Litecoin happens to be one among other altcoins competing with Bitcoin, launched in 2011 by former goggle engineer, Charlie Lee who called it ''The Lite Version of bitcoin". This means that Litecoin adopts many features associated with Bitcoin and can therefore be compared to it. It is decentralized and require no third party to confirm transactions but rather they are confirmed through mining, Litecoin was introduced to fix problems which were discovered with bitcoins, some of those needed fixes are:

Speed
Mining
Transaction fees
Total supply/Available no of coins
Scalability, among others

Litecoin transaction Speed
Litecoin transactions have been discovered to be 4 times faster than bitcoin, this will also reduce cost on each transaction. According a research, it takes approximately 2.5 minutes to receive Litecoin, this is faster than even our normal fait banking systems whereas each bitcoin block take 10 minutes to confirm transactions. Litecoin can handle more transactions. source

Mining
This is a very important part of our discussion today, mining is basically the creation of new coins, mining allows the payment and withdrawal of cryptocurrency, during mining these transactions are verified, new blocks are created and finally miners are rewarded.

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Litecoin utilizes a model which we know as the Proof of Work (POW), Mining on Litecoin is quite easier than that of bitcoin due to the SHA - 256 hashing being utilized, with this hashing, as more and more transaction are processed, the puzzle gets more difficult leading to increased cost of mining. Whereas Litecoin uses what is called Script alogaritm,this is able to do away with all the heavy expensive equipment and allows anyone to mine Litecoin at a low cost by employing Graphics processing unit (GPUs.). This is how new Litecoin are generated.

Total supply
Clearly, it is started that the total supply for Bitcoin is 21 million coin while Litecoin has about 84 million coins. The gap in coin total supply is quite appreciable.

Advantages of Litecoin
1)Easy mining
2)Faster transaction speed
3)Cheap transaction fees

Possible disadvantages of Litecoin

1)Adoption
Unlike Bitcoin which is very well known,
Litecoin suffers from a problem of adoption.

2)Set backs from competition of other cryptocurrencies.

Conclusion
Though Litecoin was actually introduced to solve the problem discovered with Bitcoin, it is still yet to gain popularity just like Bitcoin. Having researched on this I discovered Litecoin has no white paper but it is described to be silver compared to Bitcoin as gold. Literally, litecoin can be adopted as a payment system which can be used in sending and receiving funds from around the world.

Among many altcoins, litecoin is almost as old as the mother of cryptocurrency, Bitcoin but I think it is undervalued considering its advantages and what it could achieve. Currently, it is No. 9 by coinmarket ranking. Coingeko

Thank you sir for the Lectures, see you next week.

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