“Peer-to-peer internet currency that allows payments with close to zero costs to anyone. Rings any bells? Yes, it’s the definition of Bitcoin, but also the one of Litecoin….”
Statistics
Coin Name: Litecoin
Token: LTC
Birth of project: 2011
Project Status: Litepay
Circulating Supply: 55,322,933 LTC
Validation: Proof-of-Work
Official Links
Official website: https://litecoin.com/
Official Wallet: https://litecoin.com/#wallets
Explorer: http://explorer.litecoin.net/chain/Litecoin
Other: https://litecoin.org/
Introduction to Litecoin (LTC)
Peer-to-peer internet currency that allows payments with close to zero costs to anyone. Rings any bells? Yes, it’s the definition of Bitcoin, but also the one of Litecoin.
Bitcoin was created in 2009 with open source code, and this allowed the creation of many altcoins, and in 2011 many altcoins came to life, but the one that retained the most value from now until today was Litecoin.
Its developer is well-known, Charlie Lee – and before he tried to improve on Bitcoin, he funded himself by mining some Bitcoin and gained some insight on what he wanted to improve.
October 2011 Litecoin was born and developed with two primary goals, or two primary improvements to Bitcoin: make it faster (just 2.5 minutes, meaning, 4 times faster than Bitcoin – important for merchants), and a different proof-of-work (PoW).
The purpose of this different PoW is related with the distribution of the currency, making it easier to mine, and not giving a much bigger edge to those mining with specialized hardware, so that just about anyone could mine it and access it.
Apart from these two differences, Litecoin is pretty much like Bitcoin. Following the logic, we realize that if the blocks are mined four times faster, we will have four times more Litecoin than Bitcoin when they are all mined.
In reality, it’s as simple as multiplying by four: Bitcoin will have 21 million units, and Litecoin will have 84 million. Halving rewards also happen (at 840.000 blocks), so the more Litecoin mined, the less reward to the miners.
Funny enough, one Litecoin should be worth one fourth of a Bitcoin, and even if this is far from happening now, it might be a good indicator that the price of Litecoin might still be climbing a lot. For this to happen massive Litecoin adoption would have to happen, and with Litepay and others, we just might have seen the first steps for that rise.
Litepay is a payment infrastructure that businesses can use enabling users to make Litecoin payments, but also having VISA Litecoin debit cards. In the same sense, Coinbase launched Coinbase Commerce, which also enables merchants to accept payments in Litecoin, Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash and Ethereum.
These are just some of the platforms that are adding Litecoin as a payment method, and these measures are steps being given in direction of general adoption.
This is a brief introduction to Litecoin, but if you want to know more about the coin, what people are saying about it, technical details, jump right in any of the links we present below. They are well worth reading before investing!
Price:
Price History
Feb 19, 2018: $215.42
Jan 19, 2018: $191.19
Dec 19, 2017: $359.13
Nov 19, 2017: $69.51
11 Comments
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Litecoin sounds like an interesting investment. It sounds more like bitcoin then ethereum. If you ask more it sounds like a better investment, especially because it’s faster to process then bitcoin. However I maintain that bitcoin is king because all the cryptocurrencies are valued in relation to it. It still makes sense to buy bitcoin, especially when the value is as low as it is now. I don’t think anyone solely accepts litecoin or ethereum. All merchants that accept cryptocurrencies would rather be paid in bitcoin, in my experience.
The relationship between Bitcoin and Litecoin is what makes it more fascinating and favorable than other cryptocurrency. Seeing that it’s the same the person who founded Bitcoin also did the same for Litecoin shows its more appealing to deal on than other cryptocurrency.
When we see Litecoin is a fork from Bitcoin, that says a lot about the resemblances. At the same time, there are lots of cryptocurrencies and they are all making an effort to stand out, so being faster and with low fees is an edge LTC might lose soon over the competition. It will all come down do adoption.
I’m seriously hoping that your speculation on how Litecoin might turn out with the competition among all Altcoins doesn’t come to happen because the project of Litecoin is interesting to me. I have already invested in it.
Below is actually a list of companies that support or accept Litecoin payments: https://litecoin-foundation.org/businesses/
Its actually a pretty big, and growing list.
Wow @Charlie that’s a long list of companies and it only proves one thing which we already know which is that Litecoin is well accepted and used by a lot of businesses and establishment and it’s a very good thing.
Great list, thank you for sharing @Charlie!
Litecoin is offers just about everything ones gets from Bitcoin but as it stands, Litecoin is looking to offer more than Bitcoin can offer which distinctively shows in the speed it would take to mine Bitcoin and Litecoin, the latter seems to be faster which makes its availability more than that of Bitcoin. Bitcoin might be the most expensive cryptocurrency but Litecoin would most certainly catch up with it sooner than later.
I don’t agree that Litecoin has more to offer than Bitcoin. Bitcoin has been here for longer, and a whole ecosystem has been developed, and keeps on being developed, around it.
At the moment, Litecoin is still way behind Bitcoin and there is no dispute on that but I do believe that with the progress Litecoin is having, it’s making a positive step in catching up with Bitcoin.
I am not seeing Litecoin catching up on Bitcoin any time soon, even if they are direct competition. Only time can tell which of the two will grow more, but I believe BTC has a way better chance of becoming the world currency, like English is the world language.