What is Litecoin

Litecoin is a decentralized peer-to-peer payment network based on bitcoin. If bitcoin is considered to be digital gold, then the title of silver went to litecoin in this race. Litecoin cryptocurrency is open source, tiny transfer fees, high speed and bandwidth, and no government control.

The author of the idea, the developer Charlie Lee wanted to improve the system of the first cryptocurrency by speeding up transactions, so he used the open source bitcoin code to create Litecoin. Litecoin code also has a free license, which means that anyone can use the open source code for their projects. The creator of the cryptocurrency himself considers Litecoin to be less secure and decentralized than Bitcoin. Considering the above factors, Bitcoin is perceived more as a store of value, while Litecoin is used for small and quick payments.

Many users use LTC for various transactions on the network, since there are no restrictions on the amount of payments. Immediately after its introduction in 2011, the coin achieved success, taking the second place in popularity among cryptocurrencies. Today, litecoin has lost its place in the rating to XRP and ETH coins.

How does litecoin differ from bitcoin

The Litecoin system, like Bitcoin, uses the Proof-of-Work consensus algorithm (proof of work done). Basically, it is a fork of Bitcoin. The LTC emission is 84 million coins.The difficulty of mining Litecoin changes every 2016 blocks (approximately every 4 days), this allows you to spend no more than 2.5 minutes on creating a new block.  For comparison, it takes 10 minutes to confirm a transaction on the bitcoin network.Accordingly, transactions on the Litecoin network are confirmed faster than on Bitcoin one. You can mine LTC even without such expensive equipment as ASIC miners, but you will need a large amount of RAM. Among the advantages of Litecoin, it can be noted that it is more difficult for fraudsters to conduct double transactions due to the fast generation of blocks.

How to buy and where to store Litecoin

It is convenient to buy litecoin through a cryptocurrency exchanger; the coin is also listed on all well-known exchanges. The purchase of cryptocurrency can be carried out with fiat funds, unlike many coins that are only available for exchange for bitcoin. Before purchasing, you need to determine the storage location of the digital asset.Alternatively, you can use a virtual Litecoin wallet, which can be found on the official cryptocurrency website.

SegWit

According to founder Charlie Lee, Litecoin helped Bitcoin to implement SegWit technology, which was intended to increase the bandwidth of the Bitcoin network.Although litecoin has a fairly good bandwidth, the technology was tested on it. Experts believe that the update contributed to the rapid adaptation of Litecoin to the Lightning Network technology.