What is LiteCoin?

There can only ever be 84 million Litecoins, and as it stands, 55.58 million have been released or mined already, meaning almost 30 million coins are still fair game for miners.

External influences (such as governments) can manipulate the value of their currency through inflation and quantitative easing, but the same cannot be done with Litecoin, making it more sustainable long term.

Litecoin was created by Charlie Lee in October 2011. Lee is a former employee of Google, who designed it to complement Bitcoin by solving some of its issues, like transaction times, fees, and concentrated mining pools.

One of the main goals for Litecoin was to reduce block confirmation timings from 10 minutes to 2.5 minutes, so that more transactions could be confirmed.

This made Litecoin 4x faster than Bitcoin. Each 2.5 minutes, a Litecoin block is mined, and 25 coins are generated. This means that at the moment, 14,400 Litecoins are being mined every day, the maximum amount possible.

Litecoin has so much scope for growth, potential uses, and wide adoption. Right now, we must observe which companies begin adopting it and accepting transactions for their products and services.

As more and more people are embracing the world of cryptocurrency, people are looking for investment opportunities outside of Bitcoin and Ethereum. Litecoin clearly looks like a popular choice.

Anyway, in this guide, we are going to do a deep dive on litecoin. Let’s take a peek underneath the hood and see how it functions.

While the identity of the Bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto is shrouded in mystery, Litecoin’s creator Charlie Lee is very active on social media and his blog. Charlie Lee is an ex-Google employee who had the vision to create a lighter version of Bitcoin.

While Bitcoin was seen as “gold” and a store of value for long-term purposes, Litecoin was seen as the “silver” and a means of a transaction for cheaper and everyday purposes. So, on October 7 2011, litecoin was released via an open-source client on GitHub. The Litecoin Network went live on October 13 2011. It is basically a fork of the Bitcoin Core client.

litecoin mining: alloween or Hallowe'en (a contraction of Hallows' Even or Hallows' Evening),[5] also known as Allhalloween,[6] All Hallows' Eve,[7] or All Saints' Eve,[8] is a celebration observed in several countries on 31 October, the eve of the Western Christian feast of All Hallows' Day. It begins the three-day observance of Allhallowtide,[9] the time in the liturgical year dedicated to remembering the dead, including saints (hallows), martyrs, and all the faithful departed.

The miners use their computational power to solve extremely hard cryptographic puzzles. The puzzle solving needs to be extremely hard, if it is simple then miners will keep mining blocks and drain out the entire bitcoin supply.

However, while the puzzle solving part is difficult, checking to see if the solution of the puzzle is correct or not should be simple.

These are just a few of the things you might hear getting tossed around when crypto enthusiasts talk about Litecoin. At first glance, Litecoin doesn’t garner much respect as a top 10 market cap cryptocurrency. However, once you get into the weeds, Litecoin presents an extremely useful and interesting application of the original Bitcoin blockchain. For all the flak Litecoin gets, it’s easy to overlook what it actually is, and what functions it serves.

Former Google employee Charlie Lee founded Litecoin. It was one of the first forks of the Bitcoin core client. It was proposed as a solution to some of the bottlenecks and scalability issues with Bitcoin, most notably the number of transactions that could be processed within a given time frame. The edge Litecoin has over Bitcoin is that the payment transaction costs are extremely low, and it is capable of facilitating payments around four times as fast.

It’s important to look at the differences in how both Bitcoin and Litecoin came about. The origins of Bitcoin’s founder are relatively shrouded in mystery. Satoshi Nakamoto (the pseudonym of Bitcoin’s founder) is essentially relegated to legend and myth.

Litecoin’s founder, on the other hand, has been publicly available and active in the community. You can find Charlie Lee on Linkedin or on Twitter, as @SatoshiLite. After working at Google and founding Litecoin, he also worked on the engineering side at Coinbase, one of the largest cryptocurrency exchanges in the world.

The fact that Litecoin can hold its own weight when it comes to having a legitimate use case says a lot, especially in a cryptocurrency world with over 700+ alt-coins with dubious purposes. It does, after all, hold a market cap of upwards of $1.8 billion. That doesn’t just happen by dumb luck.

However, to be fair, users haven’t pushed Litecoin to its limits because there simply aren’t that many people using it. For the time being, Litecoin does exactly what it was created to do: offer low-cost, speedy transactions in a way that Bitcoin couldn’t.

When compared to Bitcoin, which has a market cap about 33x bigger, Litecoin does pose several advantages. As listed above, it’s capable of offering users lower transaction fees, faster transaction processing times, a more decentralized mining network, and its founder even throws out the occasional zinger on Twitter. These advantages technically make Litecoin a better coin for the vast majority of small transactions.

Litecoin originally started gathering attention during its explosive growth in November 2013, where it saw a near 15x spike in price. This jump in price, however, was short-lived and Litecoin hovered around the $4 per LTC range for about two years. It wasn’t until May 2017 that it started to pick up steam again during a time where generally all cryptocurrencies experienced massive growth.

Litecoin has also been relatively innovative, adopting new technologies such as Segregated Witness and carrying out the first Lightning Network transaction that sent 0.00000001 LTC from Zurich, Switzerland to San Francisco, the USA in under a single second.

On a more controversial note, Charlie Lee reported that he sold all of his Litecoin holdings at the end of 2017. At the time, some community members had questioned his commitment to the project. This move was either pure genius or dumb luck from a trading perspective considering he timed the market to almost perfection. Smart investors may want to pay attention if he ever decides to buy back in.

Exchanges both large and small sell Litecoin so you shouldn’t have any problems picking up some. It is particularly popular in Asia on exchanges like OKEx, Bibox, and Huobi. If you’re looking for something a little closer to home you can grab some on Bittrex or Coinbase.

Because of the wider adoption of LTC, there are quite a few ways to store it. If you are storing a large amount your best bet is always to go with a hardware wallet like a Ledger Nano S or Trezor. If you plan to trade it regularly and/or use it on a daily basis there are some more convenient options. You could go with the official desktop wallet for Windows, Mac, and Linux.