Why not litecoin?

Litecoin is almost identical to Bitcoin, only faster and cheaper

With all the controversy surrounding the block size debate I can´t help thinking why aren´t people turning to Litecoin (LTC) as a viable alternative to Bitcoin. I mean, it is basically the same as Bitcoin with a couple of small changes destined to make it faster, cheaper and most importantly: have a bigger network capacity.

LTC was created back in 2011 by a former Google Employee Charlie Lee, he is well known in the Bitcoin community and currently works at Bitcoin’s wallet provider and exchange Coinbase. It has been said that Charlie wanted Litecoin to be the Silver of Bitcoin; with this in mind he made a few changes to Bitcoin’s original code:

• The Litecoin Network aims to process a block every 2.5 minutes, rather than Bitcoin 10 minutes: This not only makes Litecoin faster but it also gives it four times more capacity in the same amount of time. Currently Litecoin’s network is far from being congested but let’s assume for the sake of argument that it was having the same issues as Bitcoin is having today: so if one block is full, you would only have to wait 2.5 minutes to get your transaction on the next block, so even though Litecoin’s blocks are also limited to 1mb, it actually has the capacity to handle 4mb instead of Bitcoin’s 1mb in a 10 minute time frame.

• Litecoin uses scrypt in its proof-of-work algorithm, instead of Bitcoin’s Sha-256: To the regular user this makes no difference really, what is important to know is that Litecoin has a ton of hash rate destined to secure the network, it has the most reliable network out of all alt-coins and it would be practically impossible to generate a 51% attack.

• The Litecoin Network will produce 84 million Litecoins, or four times as many currency units as will be issued by the Bitcoin Network: Not much to say about this really, but just like Bitcoin you have a maximum number of coins which will be issued, this basically prevents developers from issuing coins and dumping it into the market (unlike Central Banks).

So why not switch to Litecoin?

The reason why Bitcoiners, Classic or Core supporters, don’t abandon Satoshi’s ship despite all the confusion and disappointment regarding the blocksize debate is simple and irrefutable: Bitcoin is the most widely accepted cryptocurrency in the world…by far!

1 Bitcoin is currently worth over $410 and has a market cap of over 6 billion USD. Moreover it’s accepted in thousands of merchants, traded in all exchanges and in all countries, from Venezuela to Canada and even in highly regulated economies like China. There is literally no boundaries to Bitcoin, they have the best online and mobile wallets and the most publicity, so why take a risk with a copy-cat like litecoin?

Well that is a question that everyone will have to answer for themselves, to me Litecoin is technologically superior, however I still hope for Bitcoin to succeed, because if it doesn´t the media will not only have a party destroying Bitcoin but the whole cryptocurrency scene will take a deadly hit.