Litecoin Origins And Its Comparison With Bitcoin

Litecoin, commonly known as ‘the silver to bitcoin’s gold’, is a decentralized peer to peer currency released on October 7th 2011 and went live a week later on October 13th.

The creator is Charles Lee, a California based software engineer. He not as anonymous as Bitcoin’s Satoshi Nakamoto, although he tries to. However, he is active both on social media and in his blog.

Lee created Litecoin as a complimentary of bitcoin. He was a huge fan of bitcoin (still is) back when he worked as a software engineer for Google in 2011. He decided to develop his own currency which would be more flexible and agile.

How He Created Litecoin

Lee wanted a Blockchain network in which user payments would be processed in a matter of seconds rather than minutes and hours. He also wanted to keep the processing fees cheaper than other cryptocurrencies. So, how did he do this?

He took bitcoin’s Blockchain technology, located the code sectors that created information blockages that were slowing down transactions. He then changed them to make them lighter and achieved his goal while maintaining the robustness of the whole process

Since its inception, Litecoin has become well known to crypto users especially after it reached a billion dollar market capitalization. Today, the coin has reached $8 billion market valuation. While bitcoin is perceived as a store of value in the long term, Litecoin, on the other hand, is seen as a cheaper means of transacting for everyday purposes.

Litecoin Vs Bitcoin, The Differences

Essentially, Litecoin and bitcoin work the same way. The difference being from a convenience point of view. Litecoin does the same job as bitcoin, only at a faster and cheaper rate.

The speed of transaction confirmation plays a big role in how quickly a currency gets adopted. While bitcoin transactions take around 10 minutes, Litecoin is much faster. The verification period is fixed at 2.5 minutes. This means that for every block of Bitcoin confirmation, four Litecoin blocks of equal size get confirmed.

The cost of sending an LTC denomination costs $0.02 while it’s at $0.35 on bitcoin. Though the costs are negligible at the moment, bitcoin’s transaction cost rises dramatically during peak traffic. Litecoin offers an affordable option for everyday goods without high fees that may start adding up quickly.

Litecoin has lot more coins for mining than bitcoin. While Litecoin has 84 million for mining, bitcoin only offers 21 million. This means that more coins can be distributed compared to bitcoin

The fact that bitcoin’s market is bigger than Litecoin means bitcoin may not be willing to take the big risks that Litecoin is willing. Convincing people to upgrade is also easier for Litecoin than it is for bitcoin

A Close Relationship With Bitcoin

Apart from the small differences between bitcoin and Litecoin, Lee maintains a close relationship with bitcoin’s development team and terms it as healthy. He admits that the two teams still exchange ideas and notes every now and then and that they are in fairly good terms.