A Beginner’s Guideline – What is Litecoin? (2021)
After the invention of Bitcoin, the world population came to know about digital currencies. They came to know about their potential and as a result, many new cryptocurrencies were invented. Litecoin came into existence due to this reason. Litecoin was invented in 2011 as a substitute for Bitcoin. As time passed the value of Litecoin increased manifold. The value of Litecoin has increased from zero to multi-million projects. This article discusses Litecoin and the points that make it different from Bitcoin. As far as the question of price is concerned it has attracted investors’ interests and as a result, has emerged as the world’s best performing cryptocurrency. The prices of Litecoin have surpassed that of Bitcoin’s for a long time, thus proving its ground to be the best or among the best. Factually, the generation of Litecoin is four times when compared to that of Bitcoins. If you want to invest in bitcoin trading, then check these best trading apps for android .
History of Litecoin
It was in October 2011 that an ex-Google engineer named Charlie Lee came up with the concept of Litecoin. The sole purpose of the creation of Litecoin was to create a more efficient version of Bitcoin. In the starting days, he referred to it as “the silver to Bitcoin’s gold”. Just like in biology when a species undergoes cloning to make a more efficient copy of it. Similarly, the engineer modified the basic code of Bitcoin and created a more efficient form of Bitcoin. He was unaware of the future of Litecoin and placed the fate of these coins with the common people who were into the mining business. He quartered Bitcoin by increasing its supply and lessening the time for the creation of efficient coins which were both fast and cheap.
He modified the algorithm associated with Bitcoin to some new version called scrypt. At that time Litecoin was the third digital currency that had used scrypt. In the first place, it was Tenebrix who associated itself with the technology of scrypt. In second place Fairbrix used the technology. Fairbrix was also made by Lee but was devoid of flexibility so vanished with time. The advent of Litecoin can be associated with the failure of Fairbrix that surely solved the problem and made the cryptocurrency successful.
Advances made by Litecoin
The invention led to many advancements in the field of cryptocurrency but the pioneer ones were two.
- The reduced time associated with blocks and the result of increased supply of Bitcoin.
- The usage of a newly made algorithm called scrypt.
Litecoin’s helped the miners to perform mining operations from home at first. But with the advancement in the field of digital currency and world economics as soon as the population increased and as soon as the interest of people increased in this field it became problematic for the miners to hold the traffic on personal computers. This led them to play big at a global level increasing the traffic and more opportunities. Moreover, it has better energy efficiency as compared to Bitcoin and thus proves cheap when the question of mining arises.
Limitations of Litecoin
The benefits that were kept at first place when the invention of Litecoin came into existence are no longer on the ground. With the advancements in the field of mining and digitization, the people associated with mining have also improved their strategies and technicalities. Now miners have created their scrypt algorithms making them more efficient and user-friendly. As a result, the field of Litecoin has seen industrialization. Secondly, the payments are not accepted globally in Litecoin and other options are more famous when the question of accepting and making payments arises.