Introduction
Litecoin is also the baby brother of bitcoin, and this is the first altcoin (alternative coins) in the world of cryptocurrencies. Mr. Charlie Lee has created Litecoin coding. He was the ex-employee of Google Inc as well as engineer director of Coinbase. He wanted to develop an alternative of bitcoin, which is cheap in rate and easy to buy. To concise, if you assume Bitcoin as Gold, then Litecoin is assumed to be silver. Silver can be bought at a cheaper rate and easily, even though it is a precious metal. It is said that you may not think of bitcoin, but you can think of Litecoin straightforwardly.
History
Litecoin was introduced on 7th October 2011 via an open-source on GitHub. This has minimized the formation of new block timing and increased maximum number of coins. It also has a unique algorithm Scrypt as compared to SHA-256 of bitcoin. It has also updated the kind of graphical user interface (GUI). On December 18th 2017, Litecoin touched the highest value of $360.93, which was 8200% rise in comparison to the previous years. It’s market cap jumped from $17.7 bn to about $650 bn within a year achieving a tremendous growth of over 3,600%.
Technical Details
Litecoin is written in the coding of C++ although, Litecoin is open-source software, and this project pioneered under the MIT/X11 licenses. This crypto coin is activated segregated witness (Segwit) technically, and it was also a fork of bitcoin classical with various hashing algorithms. This coding fork made Litecoin four time faster than Bitcoin. In every 2.5 minutes, mining of litecoin block happens and generating 25 coins with the process. 14,400 Litecoins are mining every day, which are the maximum coins possible in a day, and the maximum possible limit of supply are 84,000,000 LTC. The precision of Litecoin is 10−8 with and symbolized as Ł. As litecoin uses the Scrypt algorithm, so two circuit devices FPGA and ASIC are made for mining the Litecoin.
Significance
Liquidity: This coin has one of the high liquidity among all top-rated cryptocurrencies due to the increased number of buyers and sellers.
Quicker Transactions: Transaction can be completed within 2.5 minutes while trading through Litecoin, which is faster than the Bitcoin transaction.
HODL and Trading: Long term investment strategies are carried out with the help of Litecoin. More people are getting involved, and one sect of investor involves for short kind of investment strategies for traders. Litecoins have attracted both kinds of investors in massive numbers.
Immunity to Flood Attack: Whenever any third party hacker tries to induce any code into core cryptography, can summon a portion of BTC. It enables fewer chances to edit the code in the mainstream smart contract.
Market Cap: Market cap of Litecoin is incredible, which shows the values of Litecoin against present and future return on investment (ROI).
Conclusion
Litecoin is open-source crypto graphed software which is otherwise a substitute of bitcoin, and these digital coins are secure, fast, and lower in transaction cost. Litecoin is a widely accepted form of digital currency for the sake of buying and selling against bitcoin or other services also. Investors are keen to have Litecoin in their wallet like bitcoin. Many legit exchanges are offering litecoins for trading purposes, including Unicoin DCX.