The first currency trading began on October 8, 2011, and to date, Litecoin (#LTC) is traded on 180 exchanges, including Binance, P2PB2B, OKEx, Coinbase Pro, and others. The highest trading volume is observed for the trading pair #LTC/USDT and reaches $1.2 billion (79% of the total volume across all exchanges). Over the week, the minimum price for Litecoin (LTC) was recorded on Monday at $114.57. Currently, the cryptocurrency Litecoin is trading in the range of $131.86 or 11,998.18 rubles per 1 LTC.
What is the cryptocurrency Litecoin?
Litecoin is a peer-to-peer cryptocurrency created by Charlie Lee. It was created based on the Bitcoin protocol but differs from it in the hashing algorithm used. Litecoin uses the Scrypt proof-of-work mining algorithm, which requires large amounts of memory. Scrypt allows these coins to be mined using consumer-grade hardware such as GPUs.
Why Litecoin?
Litecoin is a cryptocurrency that developed from Bitcoin after its own popularity in the industry. This alternative, or "altcoin", emerged to allow investors to diversify their portfolio of digital currencies, according to Investopedia. Litecoin is one of the most well-known altcoins, created by former Google employee and engineering director at Coinbase Charlie Lee. Litecoin was the first to replace Bitcoin, and the most significant difference is that Litecoin takes 2.5 minutes to create a block, or transaction, compared to 10 minutes for Bitcoin.
'While this may not matter much to traders, miners using equipment for the Bitcoin network cannot switch to Litecoin. This keeps large mining conglomerates away from Litecoin, as they cannot easily optimize their profits by switching to another coin, contributing to a more decentralized operation. Litecoin also has more blocks and more coins in circulation, making it more accessible and faster for transactions,' explains Investopedia.
As explained above, Litecoin can conduct transactions much faster than Bitcoin, but there are also several other characteristics that investors should be aware of before starting to trade. Litecoin can handle high volumes of transactions due to its ability to conduct operations faster, and if Bitcoin attempted to process transactions on the scale of its altcoin, a code update would be required. However, Litecoin blocks will be larger but with a greater number of 'orphaned blocks'. The faster block time of Litecoin reduces the risk of double spending attacks – this is theoretically possible if both networks have the same hashing power.
Technical details of Litecoin:
The average transaction confirmation time in Litecoin is about 2.5 minutes (compared to 10 minutes in Bitcoin). The Litecoin network is expected to have 84 million units of currency.
Litecoin has inspired many other popular alternative currencies (such as Dogecoin) due to its Scrypt hashing algorithm, designed to thwart ASIC miners from mining these coins. However, it is claimed that by the end of this year, Scrypt ASIC will hit the mass market.