Everything You Need To Know About Litecoin

When Bitcoin first came out, it was the only known cryptocurrency in the world. However, fast forward a few years, and we now have several cryptocurrencies in the world.

One such crypto is Litecoin, which was a fork of Bitcoin. Litecoin was created by a man known as Charles Lee in October 2011.

Litecoin is also based on an open-source global payment network just like Bitcoin. Any central authority does not control this network.

Although it is a spinoff of Bitcoin, Litecoin still differs from Bitcoin by having a faster block generation rate and Scrypt, a proof of work scheme.

Charles Lee also developed Litecoin to make improvements on the several shortcomings that Bitcoin had. 

Litecoin is also known as the silver of cryptocurrency, as Bitcoin is seen as the gold of digital currency.

Litecoin was also the third-largest digital currency in the world when it was at its height. It was also used as a testing ground for improvements that were later applied to Bitcoin. 

Difference Between Bitcoin And Litecoin

Although Litecoin is a spinoff of Bitcoin, there are still some differences that can be seen between the two. Below are some of the differences between Litecoin and Bitcoin.

• Bitcoin was created in 2009, while Litecoin was built in 2011
• The creator of Bitcoin is known as Satoshi Nakamoto, although some debate is not the actual name of the person who created Bitcoin. Litecoin, however, was created by Charles Lee.
• Bitcoin has a coin limit of 21 million, while Litecoin has a limit pegged at a farther 84 million.
• Bitcoin has a 1o minute block generation time, whiles Litecoin uses a much faster 2.5 minutes for the same action.
• Bitcoin uses an SHA-256 algorithm and whiles Litecoin uses Scrypt.
• Both cryptos, however, give you 50 as an initial reward, with the current block reward standing at 6.25 BTC and 12.5 LTC

Litecoin was also designed to enable it to produce more blocks compared to that of Bitcoin. However, Litecoin demands more powerful processing than Bitcoin due to using Scrypt as a proof-of-work algorithm instead of Bitcoins SHA-156.

This makes the ASIC miners, like the GPU to use more processing power. 

Litecoin is part of the largest cryptos in the world at the moment in terms of market capitalization.

However, it is still far below that of Bitcoin. Litecoin had over 66 million coins in circulation as of March 2021. It also has a price per coin of 12.1 dollars as of March 2021. 

Litecoin Future Development

Litecoin has seen several improvements since it was launched, which aim to improve its transaction speed without compromising its security and integrity.

It also adopted SegWit in 2017. Segwit was first used on Bitcoin, and it works by segregating the digital signal data outside of the base block of the blockchain.

It was developed to help in addressing Bitcoin’s scalability problem. However, it came along with controversy within the Bitcoin community.

It was used as a testing ground to check SegWit’s usability on the more extensive Bitcoin network since Litecoin is similar to Bitcoin. After the test became a success, SegWit was then adopted by the Bitcoin network.

However, people who were against the adoption of SegWit into the Bitcoin network created their cryptocurrency known as Bitcoin Cash.

These people wanted larger Bitcoin block sizes and so decided to have it their way.

Conclusion

Litecoin is one of the largest cryptocurrencies globally, and there is a possibility that it could surpass Bitcoin shortly.

As its improvements keep positioning it in a better position ahead of Bitcoin, there should be no surprise that it would be able to dethrone Bitcoin.

However, there is a considerable gap between the two cryptocurrencies at the moment.