Hello, Steemians. It's another academic week at the crypto academy and it's an honour to learn from the Steemit crypto professor
@yohan2on where the professor lectured on "Altcoin- Part 1". This post will be used to solve the task associated with the lecture.
What are Altcoins
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Altcoins is a name that can be seen to have been coined from 2 words, " Alternative" and "coins" to form Altcoins which is referred to as any other coins other than Bitcoin. Altcoins are cryptocurrencies that are seen as alternative cryptocurrency to Bitcoin and their existence can be seen to have necessitated compulsory competitions in the crypto space and some of them with more interesting features that are not seen in Bitcoin. Examples of Altcoins are Ethereum (ETH), Stellar (XLM), Ripples (XRP), Litecoin (LTC) and many others in the crypto space. I will choose Litecoin (LTC) as a topic in this article.
What is Litecoin (LTC)
Litecoin (LTC) is a cryptocurrency that fall under the category of Altcoin which came into existence in the year 2011 and was invented by a computer scientist known as Charles Lee. Litecoin by market capitalization is ranked number 9 with a circulating supply of 66,752,415 LTC with a maximum limit of 84,000,000 coins.
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Litecoin was built on own blockchain "Litecoin blockchain" and operates on decentralized finance which makes it a peer-peer decentralized cryptocurrency with great liquidity volume. As at the time of penning down this article, the price of Litecoin of 1 Litecoin to US dollar is $265.95, that is, 1LTC = $265.95.
Aim of Litecoin (LTC)
As explained at the beginning of this article, most altcoins were invented to take care of some shortcomings seen in Bitcoin and Litecoin is one of such altcoins. Litecoin was invented to produce up to four times of the blocks produced by Bitcoin and so also up to four times of coin limit as compared to Bitcoin which makes Litecoin transactions faster than Bitcoin's. According to research, Litecoin is an open source global payment network that is fully decentralized such that the network isn't receiving orders from any central authority and programmed to produce 1 block after every 2.5 minutes as contrary to the Bitcoins 1 block after 10mins.
In comparison, Litcoin produces 24 blocks per hour while Bitcoin produces 6 blocks per hour and this feature is to ensure the high scalability of the Litecoin network to process transactions with speed on the network. Note that in the year 2017, Litecoin adopted SegWit (Segregated witness) which was used to test the network's effective compatibility with larger Bitcoin network and the result of the test came out a success and that made Bitcoin to adopt the SegWit after the test because of a few similarities exhibited between Bitcoin and Litecoin.
Benefits of Litecoin (LTC)
Litecoin is highly scalable, meaning it can handle large transactions at a point in time and that was made possible by its enhanced block production which is larger compared to Bitcoin's block production.
The transaction fee is very low which is a great benefit. I've considered converting my assets to LTC many times whenever I want to transfer to other platforms and the Bitcoin transfer fee seems scaring me away.
It is an effective asset used for moving money as it cost very infinitesimal amount to move larger amounts of assets during transaction, for example, a research shows that it cost just 1 out of 1000 LTC as transaction cost no matter the size of the coin been sent.
High liquidity.
Litecoin (LTC) Liquidity
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LTCUSDT pair on Huobi Global
Knowing well that liquidity of an asset is its ease of conversion to either cash or other cryptocurrencies. Litecoin is highly liquid in this case as it can be widely seen on many exchanges presented in pairs to be easily trade for other assets. I've seen this asset paired with BTC, USDT, ETH and so on, on exchanges like Binance, Huobi global, and also available on DApp (Decentralized Applications) for instant swapping to other assets.
Conclusion
The impact of Litecoin in the crypto space cannot be belittled as it has contributed greatly to the crypto world and has served its purpose very well as one of the altcoins invented to take care of the Bitcoin's shortcoming. My regards to professor
@yohan2on for this great lecture about Altcoins, thank you and I see myself learning better subsequently from you and other crypto professors.
Regards; Cc: @steemcurator01 , Cc: @steemcurator02 , Cc: @steemitblog , Cc: @yohan2on
Hello @temitopef,
Thank you for participating in the 1st Week Crypto Course in its second season and for your efforts to complete the suggested tasks, you deserve a 8/10 rating, according to the following scale:
My review :
We thank you again for your efforts and we look forward to reading more of your wonderful writing.
Sincerely, @kouba01
Thank you so much professor @kouba01 for taking your time going through the article. I look forward to learning more from you.
Welcome!!