This Is The Difference Between Litecoin And Bitcoin

After developing a keen interest in traditional financial investing, James transitioned across to the cryptocurrency markets in 2018. Writing for cryptocurrency exchanges, he has documented some of the key blockchain technological advancements.

A lot of computing power is necessary in order to confirm transactions on both Litecoin and Bitcoin. Usually, SHA-256 is a more complex algorithm compared to Scrypt. A long time ago, in July 2010, Bitcoin only had a market capitalization of $42,000.

Litecoin Ltc Price Chart

Bitcoin has 21 million coins available, while litecoin has 84 million available – four times more than bitcoin. The coin supplies of Litecoin and Bitcoin are capped, with Litecoin’s maximum being four times greater.

• However, he also noticed some inherent limitations in this new, pioneering digital asset.
• In fact, when Lee announced the debut of Litecoin on a popular Bitcoin forum, he called it the “lite version of Bitcoin.”
• The Bitcoin network’s average transaction confirmation time is currently just under nine minutes per transaction, while Litecoin’s is roughly 2.5 minutes.
• Like Bitcoin, the creation of Litecoin tokens involves a process called mining.
• It’s easy to get them through mining using a mining ring or buying them through the exchange.

Every day, get fresh ideas on how to save and make money and achieve your financial goals. It shows consistency but doesn’t have the type of growth that wows investors. Allows transparency in the flow of currency through the network. Litecoin uses a consensus model called Proof-of-Work, or PoW for short. Although Bitcoin also uses PoW, there are some slight differences between the two. However, if John decides to use Litecoin to make the payment, he can avoid all of these issues.

Who Created Litecoin?

However, as the cryptocurrency market has become much more saturated and competitive in recent years with new offerings, Litecoin’s popularity has waned somewhat. Yarilet Perez is an experienced multimedia journalist and fact-checker with a Master of Science in Journalism. She has worked in multiple cities covering breaking news, politics, education, How Does Litecoin Work and more. Her expertise is in personal finance and investing, and real estate. Full BioErika Rasure, Ph.D., is an Assistant Professor of Business and Finance at Maryville University. She has spent the past six years teaching and has included FinTech in personal finance courses and curriculum since 2017, including cryptocurrencies and blockchain.

Like most new technologies, there will always be bad people that try to abuse it for their own gain. Well, this is very similar to how you would store your Litecoin. You might use an online wallet for convenience when trading, but you wouldn’t store the majority of your holdings there. ” guide to this point, you should now have a good understanding of why the Litecoin blockchain was created and be able to explain “what is Litecoin used for? Once John sends the funds, they are then sent to the Litecoin blockchain. This means that people can send and receive funds locally or internationally, without needing to use a third party . First, we will give you some background information about the Litecoin blockchain, and why it was created.

Timeline

When we look at the technical aspects of Litecoin, the developers were never afraid to give new ideas a chance or implement innovative changes. Because of this open mindset, they implemented SegWit back in 2017, a few months before Bitcoin. That same year, they tested their lightning network by successfully sending 1 Litoshi (LTC’s smallest unit) from one wallet to another. In this sense, Litecoin was ahead of Bitcoin in terms of technological innovation. Early on, marketers portrayed LTC as “silver to Bitcoin’s gold,” a slogan that continues to attract potential investors to this day.

When it was first introduced in 2011, Litecoin was branded as “the silver to bitcoin’s gold” for its blockchain was largely based on Bitcoin’s code. While some crypto investors view Bitcoin as a good store of value, Litecoin is often seen as a better option for peer-to-peer payments due to its lower confirmation time and transaction fees. An integral part in understanding what is Litecoin is understanding how the Litecoin mining process works. The altcoin holds a few similarities to Bitcoin, however it has implemented several key differences. Like Bitcoin, the cryptocurrency uses a decentralized network of miners to verify transactions and create new coins.

Wallets

This guide explores the different ways of buying Ethereum on a cryptocurrency exchange as well as where you should store your cryptocurrency. In reality, energy-efficient crypto mining means miners end up using more machines to consume the same amount of energy, instead of consuming less energy. The deliberately memory-intensive design of scrypt only delayed, rather than prevented, the industrialization of Litecoin mining. It’s no longer realistically possible to profitably mine Litecoin at home. Find the latest Litecoin price, coin profile, news and history to get you started with Litecoin trading and investing. These above facts makes Litecoin one of the better cryptocurrencies in which to invest in (this being true from about 2015 to 2017; one can’t speak to the future). Litecoin is a cryptocurrency designed for instant transactions with near-zero cost.

As most crypto assets, LTC experienced some serious price volatility since it started trading. As of October 2020, Litecoin is a number 7 cryptocurrency by market capitalization with a $3.6B market cap (for comparison, Bitcoin’s market cap is $256B). Is one of the first cryptocurrencies derived from Bitcoin which tried to address some of the original cryptocurrency’s adoption issues. Even so, it faces stiff competition from other protocols such as Bitcoin Cash and Bitcoin SV in its positioning as a viable protocol for mass on-chain transactions. Because different exchanges have different trading or buying capacities, be sure to check if your exchange supports USD or BTC to LTC transactions. Hardware wallets like Trezor offer a good, offline place to protect your cryptocurrency from hackers. Among the other 500 cryptocurrencies, Trezor supports Litecoin.

Trending Coins And Tokens

Change the wallet network in the MetaMask Application to add this contract. After signing up, you may also receive occasional special offers from us via email. We will never sell or distribute your data to any third parties. This is a personal choice that only you can decide on yourself. It is important that you conduct proper research before investing and never invest more than you can afford to lose. Some developers believe that merging MimbleWimble with the Bitcoin protocol could lead to undesirable outcomes and would be too difficult.

Litecoin’s market capitalization has historically dwarfed that of Bitcoin. Cryptocurrencies are still relatively new for most people and can be extremely volatile.

Still, because Bitcoin’s algorithm requires more processing power, it is generally considered to be less user-friendly and more complicated than Litecoin’s. Looking back at the time when Litecoin was introduced, the cryptocurrency was heralded as a faster alternative to Bitcoin. Interestingly, it was stated that Litecoin’s faster confirmations will not be as secure as Bitcoin’s slower confirmation. But the reduction of block time was deliberately chosen in order to incentivize merchants to use Litecoin. The reasoning behind this was that merchants would more readily accept payments that are more rapidly finalized. Hence the name Litecoin in reference to the word “lite” for “fast” and “efficient” was chosen. Litecoin is a cryptocurrency that was designed to provide fast, secure and low-cost payments by leveraging the unique properties of blockchain technology.

After 55% price correction from November’s high, the market is approaching a major zone of demand. Taking into consideration that we are still trading in a long-term bullish trend, I am looking for buying opportunities. Hello friends, today you can review the technical analysis on a 1W linear scale chart for Litecoin , a cryptocurrency.

Scrypt allowed the mining process to be more memory intensive and, therefore, more energy-efficient. It was the hope of developers that, unlike Bitcoin, more people could mine Litecoin from their homes using standard computing equipment. As an early predecessor to Bitcoin, Litecoin was one of the first-ever altcoins. Since its inception in 2011, it has grown from a price of zero to a multi-billion-dollar project. Unlike most other altcoins, Litecoin’s price actually outperformed Bitcoin for several years after its launch.

• Basically, PoW requires that one party proves to all the other participating parties in the network that a required amount of computational effort has been expended.
• Compared to Bitcoin’s blocking time, the LTC network generates network blocks four times faster.
• Litecoin was launched back in 2011, and when it was established, Charlie Lee, former Google engineer, and creator of Litecoin, said it is a “lite version of Bitcoin.
• These days, Bitcoin miners need to use ASICs (Application-specific integrated circuits) hardware, which is really expensive.
• Bitcoin was relatively slow to transfer and too expensive to use routinely as a method of transaction.
• Instead, LTC uses Scrypt, a hashing algorithm that can generate new blocks roughly every 2.5 minutes, while the Bitcoin block confirmation time takes 10 minutes on average.

It charges an individual fee for each transaction, no matter how small, thus making such attacks potentially expensive endeavours. Speed – Transactions are fast, taking on average around 2.5 minutes, which is four times faster than Bitcoin which takes around 10 minutes. It’s intended purpose is to be used as an everyday digital currency.

The blockchain is a shared digital ledger which holds a record of all litecoin transactions. Recent cryptocurrency transactions are grouped together into ‘blocks’ by miners. The blocks are then cryptographically secured before they get linked to the existing blockchain. Similar blockchain technology is used for a number of different cryptocurrencies, including litecoin and bitcoin.

Author: Joanna Ossinger