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Market stats
Litecoin originated as yet another alternative to Bitcoin—faster and cheaper. Although its relevance faded throughout the years, it is still sticking around. LTC is usually referred to as the silver to Bitcoin’s gold. To get an understanding, just multiply everything by 4. Four times faster, quadrupled supply—you get the point.
What is Litecoin?
Litecoin was created as a decentralized and peer-to-peer digital currency in 2011 by a former Google engineer, Charlie Lee. In fact, it is a fork of Bitcoin, which means it’s heavily based on Bitcoin’s code with some additional improvements. The blockchain is open-source, so anyone can contribute to its development.
Litecoin, since its inception, was made to be a lite version of Bitcoin. It’s notable that there was no premine or coins reserved for the founder. The creator, just like any other network participant, earned his coins by providing computational resources to the network and participating in the consensus.
Why use Litecoin?
Is Litecoin even worth considering? Taking its age and “dinosaur” status into account, this question is frequently asked—time to elaborate.
LTC is fast, or at least faster than Bitcoin. Most newer generation blockchains will outclass it every single time. The network also offers low fees oscillating between 1 to 5 cents per transaction. It’s ideal for transactions and not so great at storing value. Although it has a limited supply and is scarce, its price performance pales in comparison to other similar assets. The best thing about Litecoin? It’s established and accepted everywhere—any exchange or platform should recognize your deposit, and there are no compatibility issues.
How Litecoin works
Litecoin was built on top of blockchain technology. As a result, the Litecoin network is a public distributed ledger, which is transparent by design. It utilizes a different mining algorithm than Bitcoin’s SHA-256 called Scrypt, which in theory doesn’t favor ASIC miners. A new block is created every 2.5 minutes, the fees are significantly cheaper, and the maximum supply is set to 84 million coins.
Litecoin, as a Bitcoin clone, also experiences halvings, which is when the block reward drops by 50%. The idea is to artificially create scarcity and for inflation to disappear completely. This technique has been working for Bitcoin, whereas Litecoin seems to lag behind.
Litecoin's timeline
Litecoin made its debut on October 7, 2011. By 2013 it had amassed a market cap of over $1 billion. In 2017 it implemented SegWit addresses, which made the fees lower. In December of the same year, Charlie Lee stepped away from the project to make it more decentralized and independent. In the following year, the Lightning Network was integrated, enabling even faster and cheaper off-chain transactions. In May of 2022 a more original upgrade occurred. MWEB, or Mimble Wimble, upgraded the network’s privacy, allowing for the amounts to be shown only to the sender and recipient. In 2023 the fourth halving took place, which, like many others, turned out to be a “buy the rumor, sell the news” type of event.
The risks of Litecoin
Litecoin is a very volatile asset, which is one of the few that survived the test of time. Although past performance doesn’t always indicate the future, it has been underperforming many assets for a while. Historically it goes down just as much, if not more, than Bitcoin or Ethereum, but the momentum is not strong enough to ever catch up to the upside. Do your own research and see if the risk/reward ratio is suitable for you.
Litecoin was meant for fast and affordable payments. While it has fulfilled its role for a very long period of time, the competition never sleeps. Currently, there are much better solutions available on the market, which also have access to DeFi and are constantly being developed. They may seem like more lucrative investments owing to the price going up or being the new shiny coin.
On the bright side, Litecoin should be safe from regulatory scrutiny, as it was mentioned multiple times by the SEC chairman, Gary Gensler, that LTC will not be classified as a security.
Why Litecoin matters
Litecoin may have faded in the recent years, but one thing remains sure: in its early days, it introduced an alternative for those who either thought Bitcoin’s price was too high or the fees were expensive. It onboarded people to the new financial system in regions where having a bank account was uncommon. Now, although not the fastest, it’s widely adopted, with over 10,000 merchants globally accepting it for various goods and services.
