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Litecoin – An Alternative For Fast Online Payment

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2017 can be called the year of cryptocurrencies as every single coin has increased.  Litecoin is one cryptocurrency that has grown by almost 3000% from 2016.  Litecoin is often said to be the ‘Silver’ to Bitcoins ‘Gold’ though it is still widely unheard of.

What is Litecoin?

Litecoin was created by Charlie ‘Coblee’ Lee, a graduate from MIT and an ex-engineer at Google.  Coblee created Litecoin in 2011 and has supported it while working as Director of Engineering at Coinbase, the most popular place to buy bitcoin in the United States.  Charlie recently left his position as Coinbase to focus on improving litecoin as an alternative to bitcoin, with faster payments and high transaction capacity.  Litecoin is similar to Bitcoin in a lot of ways but here are a few distinguishable features:

  • Unlike Bitcoin, Litecoin works on Scrypt hash algorithm, while Bitcoin uses SHA-256 for its operations.
  • Bitcion will be limited to 21 million coins in circulation, while Litecoin will eventually mint 84 million.
  • Currently, the market cap of Litecoin is around $7 billion with 54 million coins are already in circulation.
  • Litecoin confirms a transaction in 2.5 minutes while Bitcoin takes 10 minutes for one transaction to be added to public ledger. At any point, there are thousands of transactions pending on the Bitcoin network which make it slow.  Litecoin has never reached its transaction capacity which means it can accommodate many more users than bitcoin.
  • The average transaction fees of Bitcoin is $2.5 while Litecoin fees are $0.07 or less per transaction.

Litecoin can be called an improved, sophisticated version of Bitcoin, allowing transactions to happen four-times faster than that of Bitcoin at a lower cost. Another important thing to note is that Litecoin’s creator Charlie Lee still overlooks and manages the project, while Bitcoin’s creator Satoshi Nakamoto, is an anonymous entity. It might not be a deciding factor for the successful future of the currencies, but having a captain on-board always helps the ship steer into the right direction. Coblee interacts with the crypto community regularly on twitter, and often speaks on the news as a cryptocurrency expert.

Interested in Litecoin?

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