Every node operator maintains a copy of the blockchain, verifying transaction consistency. As one of the first altcoins, Litecoin improved upon Bitcoin’s code to increase its scalability for faster transactions and lower fees. Despite not being able to compete with Bitcoin in terms of market cap, it has a competitive advantage as a peer-to-peer payment system. In fact, the Litecoin Foundation announced in November 2021 that LTC could be used as a payment method via the Litecoin VISA debit card by converting LTC into USD in real-time. In addition, certain businesses have added Litecoin as a payment method, spanning across travel companies, convenience stores, property agencies, and online stores. Litecoin’s transaction processing speed, on the other hand, is 54 per second—and new blocks on the Litecoin blockchain can be created about every 2.5 minutes.
Crypto.com App users can purchase Litecoin at true cost with USD, EUR, GBP, and 20-plus other fiat currencies and spend it at over 80 million merchants globally using the Crypto.com Visa Card. Alternatively, users can also trade LTC https://www.tokenexus.com/ on the Crypto.com Exchange. By making Litecoin’s consensus algorithm memory intensive, Lee sought to thwart the hardware arms race, though in practice, that didn’t happen as the rise of GPU mining answered the need for greater RAM.
What is Litecoin SegWit?
In comparison, bitcoin can often be used as a store of value for long-term purposes. One of the key differences between Litecoin and Bitcoin is the hashing algorithm used for mining. This makes it more difficult for large-scale mining operations to dominate the network. Litecoin can be used as a P2P method for paying people anywhere in the world without an intermediary having to process the transaction. It can also be viewed as a store of value or as a component of a diversified crypto portfolio.
Before accessing the Crypto.com Exchange, please ensure that you are not in any geo-restricted jurisdictions. The comments, opinions, and analyses expressed on Investopedia are for informational purposes only. As of the date this article was written, the author does not own cryptocurrency. Litecoin could be a decent place to place a small stake to get used to the “ins and outs” of crypto trading for the newer crypto investor, some experts say. Litecoin mining operations aren’t something you’ll typically see running on a computer out of someone’s living room.
Alternative Wallets
You can view the current price of Litecoin on CoinMarketCap and other sites. As with many of the most popular cryptocurrencies, Litecoin has experienced significant volatility over its short history. Unlike traditional fiat currencies like the dollar or the euro, the litecoin supply is capped at 84 million. As of late October 2021, about 67 million Litecoins had been mined. You are now leaving the SoFi website and entering a third-party website. SoFi has no control over the content, products or services offered nor the security or privacy of information transmitted to others via their website.
- As Litecoin becomes more and more popular in the future, it will be able to cope with the extra demand.
- From the get-go, without any additional tech layers added on top of the Litecoin blockchain, it’s a faster cryptocurrency to transact than Bitcoin, and it does so more cheaply.
- Although every transaction is available to view on the blockchain, the only information that is displayed is wallet addresses — which isn’t linked to the real-world identities of the sender and receiver.
- In all financial markets, the price often retests the last price before changing direction.
- After working at Google and founding Litecoin, he also worked on the engineering side at Coinbase, one of the largest cryptocurrency exchanges in the world.
On a more controversial note, Charlie Lee reported that he sold all of his Litecoin holdings at the end of 2017. At the time, some community members had questioned What is Litecoin his commitment to the project. This move was either pure genius or dumb luck from a trading perspective considering he timed the market to almost perfection.
The future
One key difference between your online bank account and cryptocurrencies is that they are (for the most part) entirely decentralized. The ‘ledger,’ or “blockchain,” that records and confirms all transactions as valid is publicly viewable and editable by a large system of users all over the world. Litecoin generates a new block to be mined every 2.5 minutes, which is about four times faster than Bitcoin’s 10 minutes. While Bitcoin has a cap of 21 million coins, the Litecoin supply overall has a cap of 84 million.
If you have a small number of coins and you want easy and quick access to them, it is best to use a desktop or mobile wallet (software wallets). These are great as they do not take up much space on your computer or mobile, and they are reasonably secure. That was until the creation of decentralized payment systems like Litecoin! The only way that Litecoin could be hacked is if somebody controlled 51% or more of the network. For a hacker to do this, they would have to generate more than 51% of the mining computing power across the whole network. ” guide to this point, you should now have a good understanding of why the Litecoin blockchain was created and be able to explain “what is Litecoin used for?