After it became obvious that the first Bitcoin cryptocurrency had great prospects, there were immediately those who decided to join this business. However, some already then understood that the first cryptocurrency had significant drawbacks due to the fact that no one had yet understood what problems blockchains might face in practice.
The birth of Litecoin
Therefore, the creation of an “alternative” to Bitcoin was only a matter of time. And on October 13, 2011, one of these alternatives was put into action. The creator of Litecoin was a certain Charles Lee, who took the basic open code of the Bitcoin blockchain as a basis and modernized it somewhat.
So, for example, another encryption algorithm was used – scrypt, instead of SHA-256. Due to it, the mining speed increased by about 4 times, and the transaction confirmation speed reached an unprecedented 2.5 minutes. Actually, that is why the new cryptocurrency was called lightcoin – “light coin”. The limit on the number of possible coins was also increased – also 4 times, so the emission of this cryptocurrency is comparable to BTC.
So, what improvements did Charles Lee bring to the new cryptocurrency? Let’s have a look:
- Significantly increased the number of possible coins in circulation (84,000,000 LTC versus 21,000,000 BTC);
- The speed of recalculation of the complexity of creating blocks has increased by 3.5 times;
- New Litecoin blocks are created every two and a half minutes. Thus, confirmations of transactions come faster, which makes working with Litecoins more convenient;
- The reward for the created blocks is much higher than that of Bitcoin;
The cryptocurrency mining algorithm itself has changed, which affected the availability. Now it is not necessary to have an expensive powerful computer: lightcoins are mined not by using the processor load, but by using the amount of memory.
What else do you need to know about Litecoin?
You can download a litecoin wallet to your computer (but it takes up a lot of space and, if you forget your password, it is impossible to recover it), or you can use online wallets, which is much more convenient, but not so secure.
If you are mining Litecoin or get this cryptocurrency in any other way, you need to think about how you can profitably buy or exchange Litecoins.
However, despite the noticeable advantages, the majority of users preferred to use the familiar Bitcoin protocol. That could not but affect the value of this currency. At the moment, the exchange of litecoin for BTC is approximately 150 to 1. Which is still very good. So Litecoin is currently the 6th most valuable cryptocurrency. And it is unlikely to fall below 7th place in the list in the near future.
So it is not surprising that more and more investors and active users of cryptocurrency are wondering – where is it better to exchange ltc? After all, it is quite difficult to find intermediaries who are guaranteed to safely carry out both direct and reverse of eth to ltc exchange or to fiat currency. Fortunately, there is a way out, and more than one:
- exchanger;
- cryptocurrency exchanges;
- Peer-To-Peer.
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