What is Litecoin (LTC)? Is it a complement to Bitcoin?
Litecoin is a digital currency that uses peer-to-peer technology (P2P) to quickly send payments to anywhere in the world. Due to the complementary nature of Litecoin to Bitcoin and the fact that it has created a market for itself, it is often considered to be the first successful alternative cryptocurrency .
Created in October 2011 by Charlie Lee , a former Google employee and computer scientist , Litecoin is one of the oldest and longest-standing altcoins. The process of confirming a Bitcoin transaction takes about 10 minutes. In the real world, this processing speed is quite slow. In Litecoin, known as the light version of Bitcoin, the average transaction speed is 2.5 minutes, which is 4 times faster!
Chief Operating Officer Daniel Rodriguez, owner of an asset management company, states that “for cryptocurrency to become a widely accepted currency, transaction speed is important for both customers and business transactions.”
Like Bitcoin , Litecoin is used as an open-source payment network that is not controlled by a central authority. Unlike Bitcoin, Litecoin has a much larger supply limit of 84 million LTC. It halves every 840,000 blocks (about every 4 years). The next halving is expected to occur in August 2023. Due to differences in the supply limit, Bitcoin is often referred to as gold and Litecoin as silver.
What Makes Litecoin Important?
The following features of Litecoin, which is simpler and more useful than Bitcoin, distinguish Litecoin from other cryptocurrencies:
- More than 2,000 businesses and stores accepted payment in LTC from January 2021, making Litecoin the most common cryptocurrency.
- Thanks to its high transaction speed and very low transaction fees, it paves the way for Litecoin to be preferred more as a means of payment than Bitcoin.
- With its algorithm that facilitates mining, it has managed to shorten block transaction times even though the profit margin is low.
- With the half-life being every 4 years, it will be necessary to wait until 2140 for the entire supply to be extracted.
Is Litecoin a Good Investment?
It is possible to say that Litecoin, which is consistently in the top 15 cryptocurrencies by market capitalization, has become stable compared to other altcoins created at the same time.
It is believed that an increase in the use and adoption of Litecoin users on a larger scale will inevitably increase the value of Litecoin, and it has also been observed that the value of Litecoin has since increased more than Bitcoin in percentage terms.
Ben Weiss states that “If you are interested in investing in a technology that allows unlimited transactions, fast and cheap, Litecoin is a good investment opportunity.” Litecoin’s affordability and stability make it a good alternative compared to alternative cryptocurrencies.
What Are the Advantages and Disadvantages of Litecoin?
One of the biggest disadvantages of Litecoin can be seen as mining with devices called ASICs . Although it allows mining with personal computers, the fact that the profit margin is very low can be shown as a significant weak point of Litecoin, just like Bitcoin. As with all crypto assets, the fluctuating price course can be considered risky for some investors.
The important advantages of Litecoin can be listed as follows:
- It offers more storage possibilities than other cryptocurrencies.
- Simple and minimal system requirements for mining.
- Transaction fees in Litecoin are quite low compared to Bitcoin.
- The amount of supply determined is limited to 84 million.
- Trading on a large number of cryptocurrency exchanges.
