The year 2017 will forever be remembered as a special boom year for the entire cryptocurrency industry. Bitcoin which always seems to dominate the news headlines witnessed an overall growth of over 1300% throughout the year, and at a given time was worth as much as 20 times its value from the beginning of the year before shedding some of that in a price correction.
Despite its love of the limelight, Bitcoin is far from being the biggest beneficiary of the price surge in 2017, Litecoin was among those that saw their prices surge several thousand percents from about $4, to about $400 at its peak. As a refresher, we will go over what make this altcoin different from Bitcoin and what it brings to the table for its users.
What is Litecoin?
Litecoin is a blockchain based cryptocurrency that was the creation of Ex Google Engineer Charlie Lee, who created it in 2014 to be what he termed the Sliver to Bitcoin. Litecoin is among the first altcoins in the industry and works broadly the same way Bitcoin does in both its mining and transaction, putting pressure on what was being perceived as some of Bitcoin’s points of weaknesses in providing a much more efficient peer to peer means of transaction between people no matter where they are located. Litecoin despite its improvement on the working indices of Bitcoin has always maintained it is just a currency that seeks to compliment rather than replace Bitcoin.
Bitcoin Vs Litecoin: The Differences
The following are the major differences between Litecoin and its big cousin the Bitcoin
Coin Cap: Both Bitcoin and Litecoin share a similarity in that both digital assets recognize the importance of scarcity in driving up demand and value of any given commodity, and as such both currencies come with a rather limited supply of currencies on their separate blockchains. However, while Bitcoin comes with a maximum supply of 21 million Bitcoins to be ever created on its blockchain, Litecoin has a more relaxed number which stands at 84 million Litecoins that will ever exist.
Transaction Speeds: One of the reasons that inspired the creation of Litecoin was the fact that Bitcoin was forecasted to become a rather slow and terribly tedious means of transaction for its users. A single block takes a minimum of 10 minutes to create on the Bitcoin blockchain compared to just over 2 minutes on the Litecoin chain. This makes Litecoin at least four times faster than Bitcoin as means of transaction
Cheaper Fees: Another perceived point of weakness in Bitcoin and which has been forcing a lot of businesses to abandon using it as their preferred means of exchange is that it has become terribly expensive to use, which makes it uneconomical to use for making micro payments. Litecoin in order to solve this problem gives its users the chance to use a currency that offers them close to zero transaction fees making it one the best choices for businesses that accept small payments for their goods and services.