Litecoin was created by Charlie Lee and is originally a fork of Bitcoin. Lee intended to create a ‘lighter’ version of Bitcoin that had a faster block time, a coin supply limit of 84 million instead of 21 million and halved every 840,000 blocks as opposed to 210,000 blocks from Bitcoin.
Litecoin is one of the most popular cryptocurrencies in the world and was ranked 2nd right behind Bitcoin for many years. Today, Litecoin is ranked 7th by market capitalization according to Coinmarketcap. The current price of 1 Litecoin is $57 but was as high as $350 back in 2017.
Fundamental Difference Between Litecoin and BTC
A lot of people regard Litecoin as a simple copy of Bitcoin that doesn’t offer anything else, however, that is not entirely true. Litecoin does possess some fundamental differences compared to Bitcoin.
Mining is certainly the most important difference even though both coins use the Proof of Work consensus, Litecoin uses the ‘Scrypt’ algorithm instead of the classic SHA-256. This allows people to mine Litecoins using simple memory cards instead of specialized ASICs. The Scrypt algorithm is specifically designed to make mining available for everyone.
Additionally, the average block mining speed for Litecoin is around 4 times faster than Bitcoin’s. Litecoin is often used to send transactions because they are faster and cheaper.
So What’s the Potential of Litecoin?
Litecoin, like any other cryptocurrency, has the potential to go up or down massively at any given point but is someone even working on Litecoin anymore? Yes, the Litecoin Foundation is a non-profit organization created specifically to drive Litecoin’s adoption as well as educating people about it.
The Foundation has recently partnered with BlockFi to bring more liquidity to users. Back in 2019, the foundation also partnered with StormX to reward users in Litecoin.
Clearly, the foundation is working and it’s definitely dedicated to Litecoin. The digital asset is worth only around $57 today, a pale number in comparison to its peak of $350. Litecoin obviously has the potential to grow a lot more in the future.
Conclusion
No one knows if any cryptocurrency is worth it but one thing is certain, Litecoin is very much alive, still one of the top cryptocurrencies after so many years with a foundation behind it willing to work hard to bring its adoption up.
Litecoin is already traded on all top exchanges including Binance, Bitfinex, Huobi and many others.
