Steemit Crypto Academy | Season 2: Altcoins – Part1 "Looking beyond the Bitcoin": Homework task for prof @yohan2on by @salma78

Greetings to everyone here on this platform, I am very happy to share my homework task for this week's course by prof @yohan2on.

INTRODUCTION

WHAT IS LITECOIN (LTC)?

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A type of cryptocurrency created to provide rapid, secure, and low-cost payments by the leveraging of unique properties of blockchain technology is called Litecoin.
Litecoin was developed just as the protocol used in Bitcoin (BTC), but the following factors dictate how its process differs from the Bitcoin;
i. The use of the hashing algorithm in litecoin

ii. The block transaction times

iii. The hard cap

HOW LITECOIN OPERATES

The following illustration explains how litecoin works;

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Litecoin has a very low fee which makes it affordable for micro-transactions and point of sale payments. Its block time is just 2.5 minutes. Litecoin was released by Charlie Lee on 7th October 2011 and it went live on the 13th of October 2011. It is now among the best ten cryptocurrencies in the coinmarketcap by market capitalization due to its high usage by merchants.

FOUNDERS OF LITECOIN

The founders of Litecoin include the following;

1. Charlie Lee (CEO): He is also known as “Chocobo”. He is an early cryptocurrency miner and a computer scientist who was an alma mater software engineer for Google. He was also the director of engineering at Coinbase between the years 2015 and 2017.
   He is currently an outspoken advocate of cryptocurrencies and also the current managing director of Litecoin Foundation.

2. Xinxi Wang

3. Alan Austin

4. Zing Yang

THE UNIQUENESS OF LITECOIN FROM BITCOIN

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Litecoin is the second most known pure cryptocurrency aside from Bitcoin. The following enumerates how litecoin is unique from Bitcoin:

1. Litecoin is more difficult and expensive to create than Bitcoin due to the use of an algorithm, FPGA, and ASIC devices for mining litecoin whilst Bitcoin use SHA-256.

2. Litecoin processes each block every 2.5 minutes whilst Bitcoin does so in 10 minutes. This makes transactions from Litecoin to be faster as compared to that of Bitcoin.

3. Litecoin also involves the use of scrypt in its proof-of-work algorithm.

HOW MANY LITECOIN (LTC) CURRENCY ARE AVAILABLE IN CIRCULATION?

The amount of Litecoin in circulation increases gradually with each newly mined block just as most proof-of-work (POW) cryptocurrencies.

Out of a total maximum supply of 84 million LTC, about 66.245 million LTC have already been mined as of January this year. There was an estimation recently that in the next 100 years, litecoin will be well over since the number of LTC mined per block decreases every four years.

HOW SECURED IS LITECOIN NETWORK

Litecoin is protected by an incredibly strong cryptographic defense which makes it practically impossible to crack. Litecoin makes use of the PoW consensus algorithm to ensure transactions are quickly confirmed and without mistakes. Its security network ensures the prevention of double-spending, while also ensuring its network is 100% uptime.

WHERE CAN ONE BUY LITECOIN

Litecoin can be purchased on a variety of exchanges and these includes the following;

1. Huobi Global
2. Binance
3. Coinbase Pro
4. OKEx
5. Kraken

HOW TO BUY LITECOIN USING BINANCE

1. Open your Binance App and login into your account
2. Click on Markets

1. Select LTC/BNB to buy Litecoin

1. Enter the amount of LTC you wish to buy

1. Click on BUY LTC to confirm the transaction

HOW TO SELL LITECOIN USING BINANCE

1. Open your Binance App and login into your account
2. Click on Markets

1. Select LTC/BNB to sell Litecoin

1. Enter the amount of LTC you wish to sell

1. Click on SELL LTC to confirm the transaction.

MERITS OF USING LITECOIN

1. Litecoin is decentralized just like other cryptocurrencies, which indicates that users don’t have to depend on third parties for transactions to be done.

2. It is very fast

3. It is also scalable: It performs 56 transactions per second

4. Litecoin is an open-source network; which means its protocol can be amended easily at any point in time.

5. It has low transaction fees as compared to other crypto payment systems.

6. It is easy to trade Litecoin.

DISADVANTAGES OF USING LITECOIN

1. It has lost some of its credibility with time.

2. It is the second most popularly used coin on the Dark Web

3. It has branding issues

CONCLUSION

Litecoin is currently ranked in 9th position which indicates that it is really gaining ground in the crypto market. Also looking at when Litecoin was released, we can see that it has really grown rapidly in some short time. It is somehow good to invest in this coin as a beginner in trading investment due to its low transaction fees, high speed, better scalability, and the use of the algorithm in its mining.