Market CapVolume 24hCirculating SupplyMaximum Supply$ 4,837,619,816 61,363,734 LTC$ 1,671,057,265 21,196,852 LTC61,363,734 LTC61,363,734 LTCWhat Is Litecoin

Litecoins (LTC) are the cryptocurrency units of the Litecoin platform which went live in October 2011. Its creator, former Googles employee Charlie Lee, wanted to create a global decentralized payment network similar to Bitcoin, but addressing what he perceived as Bitcoins issues. Lee was dissatisfied with its long verification periods, slow transactions and rising transaction fees. Seeing the bitcoins as a sort of virtual gold, his litecoins aimed to become at least an equivalent of silver in the crypto world, according to him.

Lee and his colleagues created Litecoin as a software fork of Bitcoin. While it does not share a common transaction history (which is the case in both hard and soft forks), it is based on Bitcoins code. The goal was to improve the number of processed transactions by at least four times and bring down the associated fees to an acceptable level. Litecoin has eventually managed to beat Bitcoin in this, with its average verification periods taking about two and a half minutes.

In addition to speed, the transactions involving this coin come at lower costs. In order to keep them as low as possible, litecoins had their production cap increased to 84 million units. In October 2018, 58.9 million of these were in circulation, with the market cap standing at around USD 2.9 billion. Similar to other cryptocurrencies, the price of this coin went through some rocky periods ranging from a high of USD 420 per coin in late 2017 to what it is today.

Mining is another way in which Litecoin is trying to become more accessible than Bitcoin. It uses the Scrypt algorithm, which needs less power than Bitcoins SHA256, and boasts faster block generation than Bitcoin. Litecoin also still manages to prevent the dominance of a single miner (or a group of them) at the expense of its accessibility.

Litecoin is also exploring new territories when it comes to enhancing its privacy and fungibility-related features. As announced in February 2019, this is to be done mainly by integrating the Mimblewimble protocol with the help of the team behind the Beam coin. Once fully implemented, the technology will allow for on-chain conversion of regular LTC into its Mimblewimble variant and vice versa. The Mimblewimble-powered LTC should offer better confidentiality of transactions made with it.

At the same time, mining litecoins still takes some serious investments, prompting many to turn to cryptocurrency exchanges as the main choice for obtaining the cryptocurrency. Those who want to get their hands on LTC in this manner can do it on Bitfinex, Coinbase Pro or similar platforms.

Find the latest Litecoin news here.

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What Is Litecoin? LTC News, Price and Charts

Litecoin The Twisted, and Better Version of Bitcoin

Bitcoin was nothing short of a fantasy when it was launched. A decentralized cryptocurrency, untouched by finance monarchists, made for people by people a truly democratic option to exchange money throughout the world, cheaply and speedily. Its creation certainly brought an intellectual change inside the banking sector. And now, we see how Bitcoin is being watched by some of the biggest corporate players for being a futuristic nexus in the global payment bazaar.

But even with all the kettledrums, Bitcoin has few setbacks of its own. For instance: the innovative digital currency takes around 10 minutes to confirm/generate a block. Also, miners would be able to mint only 21 million units of Bitcoin by the end of its time. Even though the drawbacks are handful, but there they are, ensuring no perfection in this seemingly perfect digital currency.

It clearly explains how Litecoin, another cryptocurrency that was launched three years after Bitcoin, was created out of the necessity to address such drawbacks. The brainchild of an ex-Googler Charles Lee, Litecoin was invented by twisting the Bitcoins open source code, the result of which made it a better real-time settlement currency than its predecessor literally.

Just like Bitcoin, Litecoin is a decentralized peer-to-peer cryptocurrency, operated and controlled by none. Due to its number of user-centric benefits over Bitcoin, Litecoin soon became the second most traded cryptocurrency a place which it holds even today. People also call it a silver to the gold Bitcoin, a factor that ensures it smooth adoption among merchants and users till this date.

As users have noted, the transaction confirmation time taken in case of Litecoin is four times faster than that of Bitcoin. Also, miners seem to prefer minting Litecoin due to its relatively less block generation time, i.e. 2.5 minutes which, in case of Bitcoin, is around 10 minutes.

Finally, litecoin uses S-Crypt algorithm: a rigid sequential memory function that was first perceived by Colin Percival. This function is said to have a significant advantage over the Bitcoins SHA256 algorithm, especially in regards to speedy and cost-effective mining techniques. An individual miner therefore could opt to mine Litecoin over Bitcoin, as it simply saves him money and time. [We will explain it further in a separate Litecoin mining section as follows]

Generally, mining a S-crypt based cryptocurrency like Litecoin is no different than mining a SHA256 cryptocurrency Bitcoin. However, Bitcoin mining has become quite expensive in past few months, especially after the arrival of ASIC machines that ensures to solve blocks quickly, in addition to saving electricity consumption as well. But at the same time, ASICs come very costly, which ends up adding burden on miners initial investments.

At that point of time, Scrypt mining comes as a best alternative for miners as it can be done even by using a CPU or GPU machine. There are dedicated ASICs available for Scrypt coins as well, but their use have notably dropped because of poor performance issues. Scrypt however remains to a memory eating method, but its cryptocurrencies could still be mined by using a home PC with a powerful graphic card. Laptops with integrated graphic cards are not a good option to mine Litecoin, literally.

Before you actually start to mine Litecoins, there is one very important tool you must have to store them safely a wallet. This wallet not only will store miners hard-earned money but will also prove to be useful in transferring Litecoin from one place to another. Downloading a Litecoin wallet is as simple as downloading a normal windows/MAC application. There are many independent and open-source Litecoin wallet software available in the market. They are:

Note: Sometimes, these wallets take ages to install on your personal computer for they have to download the entire blockchain before becoming usable to the clients. Please keep some patience when you download them.

If you are not as rich as Tony Stark, there is a least chance of you using a specific mining hardware to mine Litecoin. Therefore, you will likely be relying on CPU, or CPU+GPU. We will though recommend you to try out some expensive GPU machines, as they tend to have a far better calculation solving features than the CPU machines. The more the processing power, the faster the mining is.

You could also choose to build rigs for yourself a slightly complex thing to do. You can learn it from watching this video.

There are two method to mine Litecoin, or any other coin out there: Solo or Pool. As it sounds, Solo Mining restricts you in your own den, where the losses and the profits belong to you only. If you are a beginner with only a few bucks left in the pocket, going solo is definitely not the best idea as it will put all the financial pressure on you, and you only.

Conversely, pool mining will make you join a group of Litecoin miners where you will be require to contribute power from your end. Here, the chances of you all solving a single block will be greater. At the same time, the returns will be distributed among each and every associated miner, therefore reducing your income.

After going through every basic step discussed above, all you will need in the end is a software to start mining Litecoin. The widely accessible ones available in the market are: CPUMINER and CGMINER. You can also use both the software in parallel to boost your block solving power.

The Litecoin you earn at the end of the day could either be held or sold in the trading market, at a good price. The Litecoin price however is seeing a very sharp decline since last year, and hints to move in parallel with Bitcoin price action now a day. It is therefore very important that you watch the fundamentals and technical aspects of Litecoin price before deciding to sell it in the market. Hold it only if you are a true believer. You can find many Litecoin exchanges on internet to sell your Litecoins.

Disclaimer: The above article is for educational purposes only. NewsBTC.com doesnt endorse any of the products mentioned, nor hold any responsibility of losses incurred due to their services. Litecoin mining is prone to occasional losses and undertaking this business is an individuals own choice. NewsBTC.com wont be hold responsible for any losses incurred after reading this article.

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Litecoin Value | Litecoin Price | Litecoin Wallet ...

Mining litecoins since October 21, 2011

New to Litecoin mining? Read our Beginner's Guide!

Welcome to the first true pay-per-share (PPS) Litecoin pool.Some of our key features:

Every valid share you submit to this pool is instantly credited to your accountat the current pay-per-share (PPS) rate.This rate, expressed in litecoins,also takes into account merged-mined coins such as Dogecoin,resulting in higher payouts than a regular Litecoin pool. Thanks to merged mining, you have to pay no fee;in fact, your earnings may even be higher than with a 0-fee PPS system.

This is not a PPLNS, SMPPS or RBPPS pool:we always pay for your work,even if the pool has not yet solved enough blocks to cover the earnings generated.On other systems, miners are only rewarded when and if a block matures,but sometimes blocks get orphaned from the Litecoin network,and therefore yield no reward.A PPS pool, on the other hand,takes on the risk of bad luck so you don't have to deal with varianceand orphaned blocks.

LitecoinPool.org was started shortly after the birth of Litecoin by Pooler,who is well known in the community as a member of the Litecoin core development teamand for being the maintainer of the cpuminer software package.Since the very start, the pool used ad-hoc software:Pooler wrote the front end entirely from scratch, with security and efficiency in mind,while the mining back end was originally a heavily-modified version of Jeff Garzik's pushpool.After two weeks of intensive testing, on November 5, 2011the pool opened its doors to the public, becoming the first PPS pool for Litecoin.In April 2012 LitecoinPool.org also became the first pool to supportvariable-difficulty shares, a technique later dubbed vardiff by Bitcoin pools,allowing miners to drastically reduce their network bandwidth usage.

Thanks to its advanced features and its reliability, the pool quickly attracteda very high number of miners, to the point that during the first half of 2012it often constituted over 40% of the entire Litecoin network.Due to centralization concerns, it was decided to temporarily close new registrations;later in 2012, registrations were reopened, but have since been subjectto approval.

In August 2013 the back-end software was completely redesigned and rewrittenfrom scratch to implement advanced efficiency and scalability optimizationsthat Pooler devised after implementing support for the Stratum protocol in cpuminer.This new implementation makes LitecoinPool.org the first Litecoin poolbased entirely on software written from scratch, and the first poolto implement extensions to the Stratum protocol such asresume, suggest_difficulty and suggest_target.

In September 2014 LitecoinPool.org also became the first Litecoin poolto offer secure mining over TLS-encrypted Stratum connections,protecting miners from potential man-in-the-middle attacks.

We wish to thank all the people who have, directly or indirectly,contributed to the development of this pool.In particular, many thanks go to (in alphabetical order):coblee, DeLorean731, Derringer, diki, g2x3k, Graet, guruvan,inlikeflynn, jgarzik, LittleDuke, piperitapatty, pontius,rTech, shawnp0wers, ssvb, terrytibbs, WKnight, Xurious.

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litecoinpool.org

So you've heard about Litecoin mining and you want to find out more. This page is for you.

See the Litecoin Association's introductory video to Litecoin.

Just like its older brother Bitcoin, Litecoin is an online network that people can use to send payments from one person to another.Litecoin is peer-to-peer and decentralized, meaning that it is not controlled by any single entity or government.The payment system does not handle physical currencies, like the dollar or the euro;instead, it uses its own unit of account, which is also called litecoin (symbol: or LTC).This is why you will often see Litecoin categorized as a virtual or digital currency.Litecoins can be bought and sold for traditional money at a variety of exchanges available online.

If you already know Bitcoin, Litecoin is very similar,the two main differences being that it has faster confirmation times and it uses a different hashing algorithm.

Instead of having one central authority that secures and controls the money supply (like most governments do for their national currencies),Litecoin spreads this work across a network of miners.Miners assemble all new transactions appearing on the Litecoin network into large bundles called blocks,which collectively constitute an authoritative record of all transactions ever made, the blockchain.

The way Litecoin makes sure there is only one blockchain is by making blocks really hard to produce.So instead of just being able to make blocks at will, miners have to producea cryptographic hash of the block that meets certain criteria,and the only way to find one is to try computing many of them until you get lucky and find one that works. This process is referred to as hashing.The miner that successfully creates a block is rewarded with 25 freshly minted litecoins.

Every few days, the difficulty of the criteria for the hash is adjusted based on how frequently blocks are appearing,so more competition between miners equals more work needed to find a block.This network difficulty, so called because it is the same for all miners, can be quantified by a number;right now, it is 11,856,949.

Litecoin mining can be profitable, but only under certain conditions.In the early days people could make a profit by mining with their CPUs and GPUs, but that is no more the case today.The introduction of specialized mining hardware (commonly referred to as ASICs),which can mine much faster and much more efficiently, has made finding blocks much harder with general-purpose hardware.

If you compare the profitability analyses fora CPU,a GPU andan ASIC,you will see that the costs of CPU and GPU mining largely exceed the rewards,and even with free electricity the profits are so small that they are hardly worth the effort.

Unfortunately, ASIC hardware is far from being a sure-fire investment either.Potential buyers should be extremely careful, as various elements should be considered:

Most importantly: always do your own research, and never trust any single source of information.Good starting points areLitecoinTalk.ioand the /r/litecoinand /r/litecoinmining subreddits.

Don't feel like investing in expensive hardware? That's fine!Not everyone needs to be a miner.In fact, the easiest way to get started with Litecoin is to buy some at an exchange.

As we've seen above, finding a block is very hard. Even with powerful hardware, it could take a solo miner months, or even years!This is why mining pools were invented: by sharing their processing power, miners can find blocks much faster.Pool users earn shares by submitting valid proofs of work,and are then rewarded according to the amount of work they contributed to solving a block.

The reward systems used by mining pools can be roughly subdivided into two categories: proportional systems and pay-per-share systems.

Choosing a mining pool can be a very personal decision, and several factors should be taken into consideration,including features, reliability, reputability, and user support.

ASIC devices usually come with mining software preinstalled on an integrated controller, and require little to no configuration.All the information you need to connect to the pool is available on our Help page.

If you have decided to do some CPU mining (just for the fun of it, since as we've seen above you are not going to make any profit),you should download Pooler's cpuminer.GPU mining is considerably harder to set up, and not much more efficient than CPU mining when compared to ASICs.Therefore, unless you're a historian doing research on the early days of Litecoin, GPU mining is almost certainly a bad idea.

See more here:

Beginner's Guide | litecoinpool.org

New Flair Rule

We've been overwhelmed with newcomer posts. In light of this, we created a bot that will PM people without flairs various pertinent information to read through when they post. In order to stop receiving these, simply add a flair to your name. Thanks!

(Re-post of u/Sparkswont cuz it was archived)

Whether you're new to cryptocurrency and have no clue what a 'litecoin' is, or a seasoned investor in cryptocurrencies, the resources below will answer all your questions. If you still have questions, feel free to ask below in the comments!

Litecoin (LTC or ) is a peer-to-peer cryptocurrency and open source software project released under the MIT/X11 license. Litecoin is one of the largest, oldest, and most used cryptocurrencies in the world. Similar to Bitcoin, Litecoin uses blockchain technology to process transactions.

So what's the difference? To process a block, Litecoin takes 2.5 minutes rather than Bitcoins 10 minutes. This allows for faster processing times. Litecoin also has the capability to produce a total of 84 million units, compared to Bitcoins 21 million. In addition, Litecoin uses scrypt in its proof-of-work algorithm, a sequential memory-hard function requiring asymptotically more memory than an algorithm which is not memory-hard.

Still confused? Take a look at this video!

There are many websites and applications where you can buy and sell Litecoin, but make sure the exchange you are using is trusted and secure. Here are some exchanges that are trusted in the cryptocurrency community:

Litecoin (and other cryptocurrencies) is stored in a digital wallet. When storing Litecoin, you want to make sure you trust the place you store them. This is why it is best to store them yourself through the electrum wallet. It is highly suggested to not store your Litecoin in an exchange (such as Coinbase, Poloniex, Bittrex, etc.) because you don't control the private keys. If the exchange ever goes offline, or becomes insolvent, your Litecoin essentially disappear.

Some other options are:

If you're a fan of mobile devices, then Loafwallet is the wallet for you. Developed by a Litecoin Foundation Dev, /u/losh11, this mobile wallet works great! And remember to always make sure to write down your seedkeys.

Hardware wallets are another great option, in fact, they are said to be the most secure way to store cryptocurrencies. Below is a list of the litecoin flexible hardware wallets.

Litecoin is in the top ten of all cryptocurrencies by market capitalization. Websites are rapidly adopting Litecoin as a method of payment as well. If you yourself want to accept LTC as a business, you can refer to these merchant manuals. Alternatively, if you would like to explore websites that accept Litecoin, head over to /r/AcceptingLTC.

Here are also several of our favorite merchants accepting Litecoin.

The Litecoin community is extremely kind and robust. There are many forums and places where you can discuss Litecoin with others who are interested in the currency. Here are the main ones:

If you have more questions, or are genuinely interested in learning more about Litecoin then be sure to read this series. If you have a specific question that you can't seem to find the answer too, ask below and someone will help you out!

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Litecoin r/litecoin - reddit

Litecoin, the bitcoin rival founded by thewidely-respectedmanaging director of the Litecoin Foundation Charlie Lee, has popped higher today, rising 10% over the last 24 period and boosting the wider cryptocurrency market, including ethereum, Ripple's XRP, and bitcoindespite recent warnings over the health of the bitcoin market.

The litecoin price rose to $37 after falling under the psychological $30 price last month amid a bitcoin and cryptocurrency bear market that's dragged on the sector for the last 13 months. Litecoin fell to lows of around $22 late last year as the so-called crypto winter took its toll, downsome 93% from its all-time high.

Litecoin's rapid rise saw it overtake first bitcoin cash, an offshoot of the original bitcoin, and then EOS, an ethereum rival, moving into fourth place on the list of the world's biggest cryptocurrencies by market value, according to CoinMarketCap prices.

The litecoin price boomed along with many other major cryptocurrencies throughout 2017 but has since fallen sharply back.Getty

Litecoin's leap higher comes after news yesterday that the Litecoin Foundation and Beam, a software development outfit which has its own cryptocurrency, have officially decided to work together to explore whether Litecoin should implement the protocol Mimblewimble, named aftera Harry Potter spell that stops people from spilling secrets and designed to improve privacy and scalability.

"We have started exploration towards adding privacy and fungibility to Litecoin by allowing on-chain conversion of regular LTC into a Mimblewimble variant of LTC and vice versa," Beam wrote in a Medium post. "Upon such conversion, it will be possible to transact with Mimblewimble LTC in complete confidentiality."

MimbleWimbleallows the user to encrypt all data with respect to a transaction made on the cryptocurrency network and iflitecoin did adopt it, it would require a so-called hard fork of the cryptocurrency a new version of litecoin to reflect the update.

The litecoin price jumped higher after trading flat so far in February.CoinDesk

"Lee has previously mentioned in various conversations his interest and hesitation with MimbleWimblebut had hoped that the community would adopt the change if it proved to be a worthwhile upgrade to the network," according to a Litecoin Foundationblog post.

The MimbleWimble implementation will also help the Litecoin Foundation's ambition to make litecoin more fungible, meaning one litecoin, or a smaller denomination, should be able to switched for another without loss of value. Bank notes are considered highlyfungible as one$20 bill canbe swapped for another or two$10 bills.

Charlie Lee, the creator of litecoin, took to Twitter to explain his interest in the privacy protocolMimbleWimble.Twitter / @SatoshiLite

Elsewhere, the litecoin price rise has pulled the wider cryptocurrency market out of the doldrums, with investors waking up to a sea of green on trading boards this morning.

Ethereum's tradable token ether rose 2% over the last 24 hours, while ripple (XRP) was up by 1% and EOS added almost 2%.

The bitcoin price has been falling steadily since it hit an all-time high of almost $20,000 in December 2017, forcingmany bitcoin, cryptocurrency and blockchain startups to slash jobs or shut down entirely and leavinginvestors desperate for signals of which way the market will move next.

Bitcoin and cryptocurrency fever gripped the world in 2017, with some major coins, including Ripple's XRP, ethereum, and litecoin, seeing pricepercentage increases that far outstripped bitcoin itself.

Excerpt from:

Litecoin Is Surging, Boosting Ethereum, Ripple's XRP And ...

Charles Lee was a software engineer at Google, spending his days hacking networking code for the search giant's new-age operating system, ChromeOS. But in his spare time, he rewrote Bitcoin, the world's most popular digital currency.

Early one October morning two years ago, Lee unleashed his project, Litecoin, onto an online universe that was still coming to terms with its more famous progenitor, and though Litecoin is still firmly rooted in the Bitcoin code base, it has found a place in the world, showing just how strong the appetite is for a new breed money.

Bitcoin has had an extraordinary run this year, but if you'd sunk your money into Litecoin instead of Bitcoin on January 1, it would have done better. Since then, Bitcoin jumped from just over $13 to its current value of more than $115. Back in January, Litecoin was trading in the $0.07 range. Today, it's worth close to $2.40. In other words, while it took 200 Litecoins to buy a Bitcoin in January, today it takes only 50.

Government regulation may put the squeeze on Bitcoin and perhaps Litecoin too. But digital currency will continue to evolve and grow. It's what so much of the world wants.

Although its dwarfed by Bitcoin's popularity, people seem to like Litecoin because it's a more credible alternative to the growing list of Bitcoin imitators, which Lee saw as either technologically challenged or straight up pump-and-dump scams. "I wanted to create something that is kind of silver to Bitcoins gold," says Lee, who left Google last month to seek his fortune in the wild west of alternative digital currencies.

He took the basic ideas behind Bitcoin a currency created by a pseudonymous character who goes by the name Satoshi Nakamoto and refined them. Litecoin was designed to pump out four times as many coins as Bitcoin, in an effort to keep the digital currency from becoming scarce and too expensive. It processes transactions more quickly, and discourages the kind of high-volume but very small transactions that have become a nuisance on the Bitcoin network. And it lets regular folks more easily "mine" coins i.e. provide the online currency system with the computing power it needs, in exchange for digital money.

The result wasn't a Bitcoin killer. But it was something that gave digital currency yet another stamp of approval.

Down the Silk Road

The Ivory Coast-born son of an entrepreneur, Charles Lee has long had an interest in economics. He describes himself as a gold investor, skeptical of the Federal Reserve. Like his dad, he graduated from MIT, having studied computer science and electrical engineering. And after kicking around in Silicon Valley for more than a decade, he was looking for something new in 2011.

He found that in Bitcoin: an open-source-software project that seemed to perfectly marry his passions for finance, cryptography, and technology. He first heard about it while reading an article about Silk Road, the online drug shopping mall, and soon, he started playing around with the peer-to-peer software that powers the digital currency. From there, the natural next step was to create his own.

He released one currency called Fairbrix but it was a dud, plagued with technical problems. Litecoin was his second effort.

His Bitcoin fork was worthless the day he launched it, and it was hardly the only Bitcoin alternative out there. But Lee took a different tack from some of the other Bitcoin imitators. He released the currency to the world after mining a mere 150 Litecoins. That meant that the whole world could get in on the currency on the ground floor.

There was also a bonus for miners, who in October 2011 were engaged in an escalating technology race in the Bitcoin world. Bitcoin miners earned coins by participating in a kind of cryptographic lottery and the folks who could do the most mathematical calculations were rewarded with the most Bitcoins. But as Bitcoin surged in value, people started building complex Bitcoin mining rigs that could do more calculations and therefore earn more Bitcoins.

Litecoin leveled the playing field, using a technology called Scrypt to lower the advantage miners would get by switching to GPU rigs or custom-designed mining systems.

Mirror, Mirror

Thanks to a few small changes to the Bitcoin way, Lee succeeded where others couldn't. Two years on, Litecoin has started to reproduce the Bitcoin ecosystem is many respects.

The Silk Road underground drug shopping mall gave Bitcoin a boost, and now Litecoin is accepted at an alternative to The Silk Road, called Atlantis. There's a company in Utah called Casascius that mints its own physical Bitcoins, and Litecoin has got this too, only the Litecoin version is from Hawaii.

You may have a much harder time finding a pub in London or a taxi cab in San Francisco that will accept Litecoin, but hey, Jay's Jerky and Goodies takes them. So does the online tech store BitElectronics.

Still, Litecoin is mostly a vehicle for investors who want to get in early on what could be the next wave in digital currencies. But there are a few signs that it's continuing to strengthen its foothold. Earlier this year, Bitcoin's most widely used exchange, Mt. Gox, said that it was going to start trading Litecoin.

To get a sense of how things have changed, consider this. About a year ago, Noah Luis the guy who mints the Litecoin coins in Hawaii convinced someone on the internet to buy him a pizza in exchange for 3,500 Litecoins, worth $30 at the time. At today's valuation that medium-sized meat-lover's pizza was worth $8,400.

Luis says he has no regrets.

A dual e-ink and LCD screen could save your gadget's battery life and your eyesight. Photo: Jon Snyder/Wired.com

The Doubleclicks: Aubrey and Angela Webber. Photo by Jessie Kirk.

In May the project got a boost when Warren Togami signed on. A former software engineer at Red Hat, he'd founded the Fedora Linux project about a decade earlier.

Togami is now Litecoin's lead developer and he's creating a nonprofit foundation to manage the Litecoin software development and advocacy, much like the Bitcoin Foundation.

And just last month, a Bay Area startup called Coinbase hired Lee away from Google.

Lee says that he isn't there to work on Litecoin. He's written some code that allows Coinbase users to swap Bitcoins via SMS. But he wouldn't rule out the possibility of Coinbase adopting Litecoin.

Bitcoin's story has been a bumpy ride. The currency has crashed and risen from the ashes. Bankers, regulators, and law enforcement agencies eye it with suspicion. In all likelihood, Litecoin will have many similar bumps ahead of it, if it continues ride in Bitcoin's wake.

But even if it doesn't survive, it's serving an important purpose, says Jerry Brito, a senior research fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. Bitcoin is "like any other open-source project where people are going to fork it," he says. "Thats good in that people are going to take it in interesting new directions."

Original post:

Ex-Googler Gives the World a Better Bitcoin | WIRED

DEFINITION of Litecoin

Launched in the year 2011, Litecoin is an alternative cryptocurrency based on the model of Bitcoin. Litecoin was created by an MIT graduate and former Google engineer named Charlie Lee. Litecoin is based on an open source global payment network that is not controlled by any central authority. Litecoin differs from Bitcoins in aspects like faster block generation rate and use of scrypt as a proof of work scheme.

Litecoins were launched with the aim of being the "silver" to Bitcoin's "gold," and have gained much popularity since the time of inception. Litecoin is a peer-to-peer internet currency. It is a fully decentralized open source, global payment network. Litecoin was developed with the aim to improve on Bitcoin's shortcomings, and has earned industry support along with high trade volume and liquidity over the years. The broader differences between the two cryptocurrencies are listed in the table below.

Bitcoin

Litecoin

Creation

2009

2011

Creator

Satoshi Nakamoto

Charles Lee

Coin Limit

21 Million

84 Million

Block Generation Time

10 Minutes

2.5 Minutes

Algorithm

SHA-256

Scrypt

Initial Reward

50 BTC

50 LTC

Current Block Reward (as of June 2014)

25 BTC

50 LTC

Rewards

Halved every 210,000 blocks

Halved every 840,000 blocks

Difficulty Retarget

2016 Block

2016 Block

Litecoin is designed to produce four times as many blocksas Bitcoin (1 new block every 2.5 minutes to Bitcoin's 10), and it also allows for 4x the coin limit, making its main appeal over Bitcoin to do with speed and ease of acquisition. However, because Litecoin uses scrypt(as opposed to Bitcoin'sSHA-2)as a proof-of-work algorithm, the use of mining hardware such as ASIC miners or a GPU mining rig requires significantly more processing power.

Litecoin is consistently among the largest cryptocurrenciesinterms of market capitalization (though still remaining far below that of Bitcoin)and it currently has more than 50 million coins in circulation.

Read more:

Litecoin - investopedia.com

Litecoin prices spiked today following a key announcement.Getty

Litecoin pricesrose more than 30% in a short period of time,climbing sharply after the Litecoin Foundation announcedpotential collaboration that could provide the digital currency with greater privacy.

"We have started exploration towards adding privacy and fungibility to Litecoin by allowing on-chain conversion of regular LTC into a Mimblewimble variant of LTC and vice versa," a Medium post revealed.

"Upon such conversion, it will be possible to transact with Mimblewimble LTC in complete confidentiality," it added.

[Ed note: Investing in cryptocoins or tokens is highly speculative and the market is largely unregulated. Anyone considering it should be prepared to lose their entire investment.]

Sharp Gains

Litecoin, whose technology is similar to that of bitcoin, reached$43.90 todayon CoinMarketCap, up roughly 32% over thelast 24 hours.

During this robust increase, litecoin became thefourth-largest cryptocurrency by market value on CoinMarketCap, surpassing rivals like bitcoin cash.

In comparison, litecoin was in seventh place on February 3and sixth place on January 6, CoinMarketCap historical screenshots reveal.

The digital currency experienced its recent gainsafter losing more than90% of its value during the so-called crypto winter.

The digital currency fell to roughly $23 in December 2018, afterreaching an all-time high ofmore than $375 in the same month the year before.

Disclosure: I own some bitcoin, bitcoin cash and ether.

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Litecoin Climbs More Than 30% In A Matter Of Hours

(Updated October, 2018) Nicknamed the silver to Bitcoins gold, Litecoin emerged onto the scene in 2011 to help remedy some of the flaws inherent in Bitcoin. To this end, Litecoin was designed to offer a more abundant supply of coins, a maximum cap of 84 million to be exact, as opposed to Bitcoins 21 million cap. Additionally, the amount of time required to carry out a transaction with Litecoin is a fourth of the time required for the same transaction using Bitcoin. This significant reduction in transaction time, coupled with the fourfold increase in coin supply, is expected to facilitate financial transactions while lowering the price of a single Litecoin compared to a single Bitcoin.With that said, lets take a look at 3 top Litecoin price predictions for 2018. Read on to see how the price of Litecoin is expected to change during this year.

As things stand, Litecoin has the 7th highest market capitalization, approximately 3 billion dollars, in the cryptocurrency world, trailing after Bitcoin, about $112.3 billion dollars as of this writing, Ethereum around $21 billion, Ripple around $18 billion dollars, Bitcoin Cash around $7.5 billion, EOS around $5 billion, and Stellar around 4.5 billion. Nevertheless, performance-wise, Litecoin has outperformed both Bitcoin and Ethereum over the past year, with appreciation values reaching 2000%. Hence, attempting to make Litecoin price predictions for 2018 may be well worth our effort, regardless of the fact that all cryptocurrencies are very volatile at the moment, given their nascent state.

Speaking about volatility, you can read our article on Ripple price predictions for 2018to understand how this works.

Be it the abundant supply or the speedy transactions, the number of people using Litecoin should increase in a somewhat exponential fashion. On the one hand, Litecoin, along with other cryptocurrencies, is tethered to Bitcoin, in the sense that the increase in usage of Bitcoin spells a higher rate of adoption for the rest of the cryptocurrencies. Evidence for this phenomenon can be witnessed by comparing the price charts of both currencies, at which point the correlation becomes unmistakable.

On the other hand, with both SegWit (Segregated Witness) and a Lightning network activated, Litecoin has the potential to scale far beyond anything Bitcoin is capable of at the moment. If youre unfamiliar with what either a SegWit or Lightning network is, all you need to know is that they are technologies that enable cryptocurrency transactions to speed up while maintaining low transaction costs; hence, not only does Litecoin exchange hands faster than Bitcoin, but it also does this for a fraction of the cost, regardless of the number of transactions happening. All of these factors should influence any Litecoin price predictions for 2018.

Recommended read:Top 3 Ethereum Project Price Predictions for 2018

When I first wrote this article almost one year ago the price of Litecoin was hovering around the 80 dollar mark, give or take. Litecoin price was at $313 at the end of November 2017, $230 at the start of January 2018, $65 in August and is now at $52.34. Should the rate of adoption go up, this should increase Litecoins price. Along with the rate of adoption and the general price movement of cryptocurrencies, a commensurate increase in the number of developers working on it is expected, which should fuel the price hike.Personally, I dont really understand how the price of Litecoin is that low. Its better than Bitcoin, its faster, it brings real value and the number of circulating supply is low (58,239,528 at the moment of writing).

As a matter of fact, when Litecoins first came into existence, their creator, Charlie Lee, envisioned them as a currency used for transactions, whereas Bitcoin would become used as a tool to store value. Ergo, this is why Litecoin was dubbed as silver for the cryptocurrency world, whereas Bitcoin was designated as gold.

In addition to all of this, cryptocurrency investors attempt to hedge their exposure by diversifying their portfolio of digital coins. As a result, approximately 18% of people buying Litecoin use Bitcoin, strengthening the demand for Litecoin and cementing it as a major player in the cryptocurrency space.

For all of these reasons, it should come as no surprise that the price of a single Litecoin is expected to hit the 1000 dollar mark, if not surpass it. The problem is the fact that other coins doing the same thing are growing, and take the market share as it happened with Ripple and Cardano in the last couple of weeks.

As already said, I am a bit confused, to be honest, and I dont understand exactly why Litecoin value is so low. Because if I look at the number of coins versus market capitalization its easy to say that at 100 billion capitalizations the price could jump to $2,500, does it make sense?

Another factor with plenty of sway on the price of Litecoin, and all other cryptocurrencies for that matter, is governmental regulations, especially those of major players in the cryptocurrency space, like China, Japan, and the United States. The best case in point is how all of the cryptocurrencies plummeted after China decided to ban bitcoin and its brethren last September, causing all cryptocurrency exchanges to close up shop.

The natural question to ask at this point is to wonder to what extent any governmental institution can regulate the flow of Litecoin; after all, the whole point of cryptocurrencies is that they are decentralized. Yet, being decentralized doesnt mean that Litecoin is above regulation. For instance, should the American government decide to prohibit any company from receiving payments in Litecoin, this could damage the digital currencys value. Also, the government can close all cryptocurrency exchanges, which is what China did, or ban the importation and manufacturing of ASICs (Application Specific Integrated Circuits) along with other hardware necessary for mining coins. The bottom line is that the Worlds governments arent as helpless as some will have you believe.

Although the powers might have a few tricks up their sleeve, does this mean that regulation is inevitable? In a sense, the answer is yes. To start with, the astounding growth enjoyed by several cryptocurrencies, most notably bitcoin, over the past couple of years has given rise to several imitators and scammers, including companies that issue misleading ICOs (Initial coin offerings, which is a whole other story). Moreover, despite a total cap of 252 billion dollars seeming insignificant when compared to the enormous size of the 1.2 quadrillion futures market, the cryptocurrency market is still significant enough to come up on the SECs and IRSs radars.

As a matter of fact, during the writing of this article, it was announced that the IRS demanded of coinbase, the famous cryptocurrency exchange website, to give away the names of all the investors who have made trades that exceed 20,000 dollars in cryptocurrency over the past year. Consequently, it stands to reason that the bigger the market capitalization of cryptocurrencies becomes, the greater the impetus is to regulate them, rendering any Litecoin price predictions for 2018 suspect at best.

You might also like: Tron PRICE Predictions for 2018

So, where is Litecoin going in 2018? The truth is that nobody really knows. The best we can do is to make an educated guess based on both the past performance and the fundamentals. Therefore, whether it is the underlying technology or the price hike this year, we have reason to believe that Litecoin is expecting sunny days ahead of it. The flipside of that coin (pun intended) is that seeing as the technology is still very immature, there is no way of knowing how it will react when Uncle Sam lays down the law. It is safe to say that it can triple or even quadruple by the end of December 2019, finishing close to $200.

To sum up, coming up with Litecoin price predictions for 2018 is a delicate topic that requires serious scrutiny from different angles, and no analysis can ever be exhaustive. Because of this, we would like to know if there is anything youd like to add? Was there something we missed? Or do you agree with our analysis? Whatever you think, let us know in the comments below, and please dont hesitate to shoot us a question if you have any.

What is your opinion about the Litecoin predictions for 2018? What price do you estimate for Litecoin? Thanks for reading!

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Top 3 Litecoin Price Predictions for 2018 ~ InvestingPR.com

About Litecoin

Litecoin is a peer-to-peer cryptocurrency created by Charlie Lee. It was created based on the Bitcoin protocol but differs in terms of the hashing algorithm used. Litecoin uses the memory intensive Scrypt proof of work mining algorithm. Scrypt allows consumer-grade hardware such as GPU to mine those coins.

Why Litecoin?Litecoin is a cryptocurrency that has evolved from Bitcoin after its own popularity in the industry, this alternative, or altcoin has emerged to allow investors to diversify their digital currency package, according to Investopedia. Litecoin is one of the most prominent altcoins and was created by former Google employee and Director of Engineering at Coinbase, Charlie Lee. Litecoin was the first to alter Bitcoin and the most significant difference is that it takes 2.5 minutes for Litecoin to generate a block, or transaction, in comparison to Bitcoin's 10 minutes.

While this matters little to traders, miners who use hardware to run Bitcoin's network cannot switch over to Litecoin. This keeps bigger mining conglomerates away from Litecoin because they cannot easily optimize their profits by swapping to another coin, contributing to a more decentralized experience. Litecoin also has bigger blocks, and more coins in circulation, making it more affordable and swift when transacting, Investopedia explained.

As explained above, Litecoin can transact a lot faster than Bitcoin, but there are also a number of other characteristics that investors need to know before trading. Litecoin can handle higher volumes of transactions because of the capability of transacting faster and if Bitcoin attempted to transact on the scale of its altcoin, a code update would be needed. However, Litecoins blocks would be larger, but with more orphaned blocks'. The faster block time of litecoin reduces the risk of double spending attacks - this is theoretical in the case of both networks having the same hashing power.

Litecoin Technical Details:The transaction confirmation time taken for Litecoin is about 2.5 minutes on average (as compared to Bitcoin's 10 minutes). The Litecoin network is scheduled to cap at 84 million currency units.

Litecoin has inspired many other popular alternative currencies (eg. Dogecoin) because of its Scrypt hashing algorithm in order to prevent ASIC miners from mining those coins. However it is said that by the end of this year, Scrypt ASIC will enter the mass market.

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Litecoin (LTC) Price, Chart, Info | CoinGecko

Litecoin Rating Report

2018-08-16

Litecoin creator Charlie Lee created Litecoin via mimicking Bitcoin's core code, and managed to survive in the sea of clone coins, gradually developing strongly. In terms of the technical layer, Litecoin made improvements concentrated in the consensus mechanism layer, and through a new hashing mechanism, lowered the barrier to entry for miners, and raised the difficult of concentrating hashing power, as well as providing a certain degree of resistance to ASIC mining. However, power still became concentrated and decentralisation wasn't achieved. This was an inevitable result of the increase in popularity of the token, and a result of the relationship between cost and benefit for miners. As a token very similar to bitcoin, to a certain extent, Litecoin can work a test ground for Bitcoin, and in a situation where it can lower the cost of experimentation, Bitcoin may need to attain a plan for improvement. When compared with other coins that have failed, there are many reasons why it has been able to gain attention. Aside from analysis of the text, "Litecoin is silver to Bitcoin's gold", it as a supplement to Bitcoin, and is use in areas that Bitcoin can't touch is one of its major aspects through which it can be promoted. As a payment token, Litecoin faces the same problem other tokens do: high volatility. Currently, the degree of support by merchants on the market of Litecoin is not enough to be able to make it widely accepted as a medium of payment. Litecoin in the top echelon of payment-type tokens. Additionally, in the regulatory realm, due to different regulations throughout the world, as well as a lack of a complete regulatory framework, the possibility of influence by external factors is relatively large. For thesereasons, TokenInsight gives Litecoin a rating of BBB. The outlook is stable.

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Litecoin | Litecoin Price | LTC | Litecoin Chart | Info ...

The market is in the red on Tuesday. However, there was a marginal recovery in the market yesterday. Litecoin price, for example, bounced from the support at the 38.2% Fibonacci retracement level taken between the highs of $41.59 and the lows of $22.62. The bullish correction managed to pull above the 50% Fib level but fizzled out short-of $34.00.

Litecoin started this years trading with a strong upside momentum. The bulls maintained itsposition above the trendline support while trading higher highs and higher lows. In fact, there was a break above the resistance at $40. Unfortunately, they could not sustain the momentum as the trend culminated in a lower correction forming lows towards $30.00.

Meanwhile, Litecoin is trading at $31.8 and is below the 1-hour Simple Moving Averages (SMA). The price is dancing with the 50 SMA while the immediate upside is limited by the 100-day SMA. LTC buyers must push the crypto above $34.00 in order for them to embark on a recovery journey towards the psychological $40.00.

On the flipside, if the current bearish trend progresses, LTC/USD is expected to find refuge at $30.00 (38.2% Fib level). Below this level, the buyers will take solace at recent lows around $22.5.

Taking a broader look at the chart, a bullish trend could be brewing in the background since the Moving Average Convergence Divergence (MACD) is trending to the upside from the dip at -1.57. Likewise, the Relative Strength Index (RSI) on the same chart, defended its position above the oversold region. Besides, it has recovered to the current position at 50.00.

LTC/USD 1-hour chart

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Litecoin (LTC): Rejected at $40, this downtrend could last longer

Cryptocurrency prices fell on Friday in Asia, with XRP and Litecoin falling more than 3%, as Ireland greenlit tougher laws on money laundering, which includes restrictions on the use of digital currencies.

Bitcoin dropped 1.95% to $3,774.9 and Ethereum lost 2.86% to $147.4 at 12:30 AM ET (05:30 GMT).

XRP fell 3.32% to $0.35471 on the Poloniex exchange, while Litecoin slid 3.61% to $31.438.

The Irish cabinet approved the Criminal Justice Bill 2019 that aims to combat money laundering. The proposed law would restrict the use of virtual currencies for terrorist financing and limiting the use of pre-paid cards and improves safeguards for financial transactions to and from high-risk third countries, according to the Irish Times.

This bill came after the European Commissions fifth anti-money laundering directive entered into force in July last year. The measures include limiting the use of anonymous payments via pre-paid cards, which will see virtual currency exchange platforms come under the anti-money laundering rules.

EU member states are expected to implement the new rules into their legislation in January 2020.

Elsewhere, after New York State announced a task force to study cryptocurrencies and blockchain technology earlier in the week, and South Africa has also established a regulatory working group to investigate digital tokens and blockchain concepts, local media BusinessDay reported.

It is anticipated that, following broad industry comment and participation, the crypto assets regulatory working group will be ready to release a final research paper on the subject during the course of 2019, South Africas Finance Minister Tito Mboweni was quoted as saying.

Mboweni said that income tax rules apply to digital currencies.

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Crypto Prices Fall; Ireland Toughens Law on Money Laundering

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Capital Markets Authority (CMA) has cautioned the public against participating in any coin offering or trading in any coin exchange offered by Wiseman Talent Ventures.

Chief Executive Officer, Paul Muthaura, said the firm is raising money from the public through issuance of digital token coins and further provides a platform for the trading of the said coins on its coin exchange.

It is important for the public to know that the nature and features of the capital raising and coins trading promoted by Wiseman Talent Ventures have not been approved by the authority, he said.

Muthaura (pictured) said Wiseman Talent Ventures, raising money through http://www.kenicoinexchange.com, is luring investors by promising to give returns of 10 per cent monthly on the initial investment in coins which were issued at Sh100 at the Initial Coin Offering (ICO) and are now purportedly being marketed as trading at Sh2,000 at its Coin Exchange.

Muthaura said the Kencoin value being marketed as exponentially rising since its initial offering poses substantive information asymmetry, liquidity and fraud risks.

The Authority is investigating the operations of Wiseman Talent Ventures. We have noted discrepancies in the information provided on the firms website and the information provided to the authority during interviews of Wiseman Talent Ventures leadership in relation to the total number of Kencoin sold and the total funds raised, he added.

Global trends

Global trends in unregulated digital currencies demonstrate that the cryptoasset market is uncertain and has experienced accelerated boom and bust cycles which may expose investors to substantial losses.

By comparison in December 2017, the price of Bitcoin was $19,783 (Sh2,020,833.45) and it has since fallen to $3,810 (Sh389,191.50), Litecoin was $366 (Sh37,386.90) a coin and has since come down to $30 (Sh3,064.50).

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CMA warns against new coin offering - mediamaxnetwork.co.ke

It's certainly been an interesting few months for cryptocurrency.

Bitcoin dropped more than 30% toward the end of November, putting it at new 13-month lows. And while crypto has been taking a bit of a hit recently, it remains a pseudo-currency that many investors are bullish on. However, when in the market for cryptocurrencies, you aren't limited to just Bitcoin. In fact, among the some 180 cryptocurrencies on the market, Litecoin is one of the biggest "altcoins" on the market.

So, what is Litecoin, and how do you buy it?

Litecoin is an online cryptocurrency that ranks as the third-largest cryptocurrency on the market behind Bitcoin and Ripple. The currency trades on many digital exchanges and wallets, and has a higher circulating supply of coins than Bitcoin. Litecoin was created by Charles Lee in 2011 and has a coin limit of 84 million.

Just like other cryptocurrencies, Litecoin functions as a payment system similar to fintech companies like PayPal (PYPL) in that it allows users to pay with or trade the currency.

The former Google (GOOG) engineer created Litecoin under MIT/X11 ln, basing the coin off of Bitcoin's original code and earning it the title "altcoin" (alternative coin to Bitcoin).

Since coming to market in 2011, Litecoin hit a peak price of $360.93 in December 2017 - up an astonishing 8200% from its previous price of $4.40 the year before,according to Forbes.And due to its similarity to the original Bitcoin, Litecoin is often referred to as the "silver" to Bitcoin's "gold."

Thereis certainly no shortage of options when it comes to different cryptocurrencies to own or trade. But, what makes Litecoin different?

Litecoin uses a proof-of-work algorithm (much like Bitcoin) called Scrypt. The algorithm produces coins at four times the speed of Bitcoin's algorithm, despite being modeled after the pioneer coin. Litecoin's algorithmhas a transaction processing speed ofrespective coins at a rate ofone coin every 2.5 minutes.

The coin's algorithmuses computing power to process transactions, whichare completed by "miners" confirming transactions in their networks with their computing power. As a result, the miners receive coins in exchange. Additionally, Litecoin's Scrypt algorithm is generally considered to be very efficient given that it prevents too much customization with hardware solutions likeApplication-Specific Integrated Circuits (ASICs), andfavors high-speed random access memory.For this reason, Litecoin's Scrypt algorithm is generally considered easier for regular cryptocurrency users to be able to mine without too much complexity because itallows minersto useCPUs (central processing units) or GPUs (graphics processing units).

The coin's market cap sits at around $1.75 billion as of 2018. Litecoin's circulation is currently59.61 million.

As of December, 2018, Litecoin is priced at around $28.

Just like with other cryptocurrencies, Litecoin has a limited amount of coins that can be mined. Litecoin can produce up to 84 million coins - more than Bitcoin.

However, Litecoin (like other cryptocurrencies) can be divided down to trade or buy in smaller amounts, so the importance of total coins has somewhat diminished.

When cryptocurrency miners mine a block of any given currency, they are rewarded with a certain number of coins. Litecoin miners are rewardedwith currentblock rewards of 50 LTC (2014).

However,Litecoin rewards are halved every 840,000 blocks, but due to Litecoin's average processing speed of about 2.5 minutes per LTC, it takes years for the rewards to be halved.

If you're looking to buy, sell or trade Litecoin, you're going to need a platform. So, where can you buy or trade it?

Cryptocurrency exchanges are places to buy and sell crypto. But before using any exchange or wallet, be sure to do your research to avoid any scams or hacking. Better safe than sorry.

There are a fair amount of exchanges that offer Litecoin in addition to other cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin.

One of the larger exchanges that has Litecoin is Coinbase - which offers a variety of other cryptocurrencies in case one isn't enough. Additionally, theCameron and Tyler Winklevoss-owned exchange, Gemini, also offers Litecoin - which can be bought with USD. As a plus, you can also buy Litecoin with BTC (Bitcoin) or ETH (the coin for Ethereum). The creator of Litecoin celebrated the addition on Twitter (TWTR) .

Ever since MtGox announced Litecoin support in 2013 and failed to deliver, I've been on a mission to get LTC added to exchanges to help increase liquidity.

With the launch of LTC on Gemini today, every single major Bitcoin exchange supports Litecoin. Mission accomplished! pic.twitter.com/6jvSyvsKdm

You can also buy, sell or trade Litecoin on Binance or Bitfinex - both fairly large and widely used cryptocurrency exchanges.

Once you've decided on an exchange to use, you're going to need a wallet to store your LTC. So, what are your options?

Cryptocurrency wallets have a variety of forms and uses - includinghardware, desktop, software, mobile and paper. You may wish to store your cryptocurrency in an easily accessible wallet, or, you might want to store it in a safe, offline storage place.

Hardware wallets like Trezor offer a good, offline place to protect your cryptocurrency from hackers. Among the other 500 cryptocurrencies, Trezor supports Litecoin.

However, if you're looking for easy, online access to your coins, go with Jaxx or Exodus as a wallet. Jaxx offers both desktop and mobile interfaces that allows you convenient access to your Litecoin. Additionally, Exodus (along with being a wallet) also has an exchange as part of its services.

But, what about Litecoin might make it a better choice for you than other cryptocurrencies? Or, at the very least - what's the difference between Litecoin and other cryptocurrencies?

Bitcoin famously paved the way for other cryptocurrencies back in 2009, when it was created by an unknown individual by the alias Satoshi Nakamoto. And unlike Litecoin, Bitcoin remains the most popular cryptocurrency with a value of over $3,519 (although it recently plummeted from around $6,000).

However, there are several key differences between Litecoin and Bitcoin apart from their value.

The two cryptocurrencies use different algorithms and have different mining specifications. While Litecoin uses a less complex algorithm called Scrypt, Bitcoin usesa traditional SHA-256 algorithm (which is a cryptographic proof-of-work algorithm much like Litecoin's). However, Bitcoin's algorithm is widely known for being more complex and stresses processing power - using what are calledApplication-Specific Integrated Circuits (ASICs) - hardware systems that can be customized for mining a specific cryptocurrency like Bitcoin. Still, because Bitcoin's algorithm requires more processing power, it is generally considered to be less user-friendly and more complicated than Litecoin's.

Additionally, Litecoinhas a much faster transaction processing speedthan Bitcoin - 2.5 minutes compared to Bitcoin's 10 minutes or so.

And while Bitcoin's market cap recently fell below $100 billion for the first time in a year, it still sits quite a bit higher than Litecoin's at around $98 billion. Additionally, while Bitcoin actually has much less total coins (only 21 million compared to Litecoin's 84 million), the coin has been traded in such small quantities (divided into 0.00000001 Bitcoins, dubbed "satoshi" in the crypto community) thatthe total number is slightly less consequential. And, while therewards of Bitcoin (which are 25 BTC per block), just like Litecoin, are halved, they're halved every210,000 blocks.

Unlike Litecoin, Ethereum is actually both a cryptocurrency and a blockchain - with Ether as the actual coin (although it is generally synonymous with Ethereum for investors).

While Litecoin is a type of cryptocurrency, Ethereum is a digital blockchain platform that creates and runs decentralized applications called"dapps." For this reason, Ethereum functions in a similar fashion as the internet, but stores data in individual blockchain ledgers instead of a general storage space like Googleor Facebook (FB) .

Still, the coin - Ether - doles out only 3 coins in rewards for mining one block (compared to Litecoin's 50).

Well, the simple answer is through exchanges.

Most investors buy Litecoin with either USD or BTC (Bitcoin). Because different exchanges have different trading or buying capacities, be sure to check if your exchange supports USD or BTC to LTC transactions.

It is generally the best option to go with a larger exchange like Binance (where you can trade BTC for LTC) or Coinbase (for using a credit or debit card with USD).

However, because cryptocurrency is a largely unregulated pseudo-industry, it shouldn't be thought of as the same type of investment opportunity as stocks, bonds or other securities. In fact, you should proceed with caution when investing (especially given cryptocurrency's volatility in recent months).

Cryptocurrency is popular for short-selling, and following the drop in price for Bitcoin, many are touting short-selling as the way to go with cryptocurrency.

"The new investment opportunity led to a fall in demand in the spot bitcoin market and therefore a drop in price. With falling prices, pessimists started to make money on their bets, fueling further short-selling and further downward pressure on prices," the Federal Reserve Bank of San Franciscowrotethis summer.

Additionally, others in the fintech space are bullish on the strategy with cryptocurrency.

"Shorting is one part of the creeping legitimization of bitcoin-we're getting access to proper financial products," Simon Taylor, cofounder of fintech consultancy 11:FS, told Forbes this summer.

Cryptocurrency is a digital asset that can be used for exchange, much like traditional currencies. However, cryptocurrency uses cryptography (hence the "crypto") to secure and validate the currency online. To this degree, cryptocurrency mainly uses decentralized blockchain technology to allow miners (people who create new blocks on the blockchain) to mine various amounts of different cryptocurrency coins as they create new blocks.

However, cryptocurrency is still largely unregulated and is not widely accepted as currency (in fact, the list of vendors that accept coins like Bitcoin is actually comparatively small). Some companies that do accept cryptocurrency, however, include Expedia (EXPE) and Dish Network (DISH) .

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What Is Litecoin? What to Know in 2019 - TheStreet

Key Points

Bitcoin cash rallied recently above $100 and $115. Litecoin (LTC), Tron (TRX), EOS and Cardano (ADA) are gaining pace and they might continue to move higher.

Bitcoin cash price formed a solid support near the $80 level this past week and later recovered above $90. The upside move was positive as the BCH/USD pair broke the $100 resistance as well. It gained more than 25% in the past few hours and broke the $115 resistance.

On the upside, the next resistance is at $120, above which it could test the $125 resistance. On the downside, an initial support is at $110, below which the price may find strong bids near $105 and $100.

Litecoin price started a major upward move and traded above the $25 and $28 resistance levels. LTC price even broke the $30 resistance and it is currently facing hurdles near the $32 and $35 levels.

Tron price finally made a nice bullish move and jumped above the $0.0140 and $0.0150 resistance levels. The price is currently up around 8% and it could soon break the $0.0175 resistance for an upside extension.

Cardano price rallied after it settled above the $0.0300 support. ADA gained pace above the $0.0320 resistance and broke the $0.0350 resistance. It is currently up around 8% to $0.0362 and buyers might push the price towards $0.0380.

Looking at the total cryptocurrency market cap hourly chart, there was a solid upward move above the $110.00B and $115.00B resistance levels. The market cap even cleared the $120.00B resistance and tested the $121.50B level. In the short term, there could be a minor downside correction, but the $115.00B and $114.00B levels are decent supports. Therefore, Bitcoin, Ethereum, EOS, litecoin, ripple, and other altcoins could correct lower in the short term, but dips remain supported.

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Crypto Market Extend Gains: Litecoin (LTC), Bitcoin Cash ...

Investing.com - Litecoin was trading at $52.854 by 03:22 (08:22 GMT) on the Investing.com Index on Monday, up 35.72% on the day. It was the largest one-day percentage gain since December 3.

The move upwards pushed Litecoin's market cap up to $1.922B, or 1.47% of the total cryptocurrency market cap. At its highest, Litecoin's market cap was $14.099B.

Litecoin had traded in a range of $32.168 to $60.670 in the previous twenty-four hours.

Over the past seven days, Litecoin has seen a rise in value, as it gained 3.35%. The volume of Litecoin traded in the twenty-four hours to time of writing was $403.714M or 2.90% of the total volume of all cryptocurrencies. It has traded in a range of $28.7950 to $60.6702 in the past 7 days.

At its current price, Litecoin is still down 87.42% from its all-time high of $420.00 set on December 12, 2017.

Bitcoin was last at $4,029.2 on the Investing.com Index, down 3.86% on the day.

XRP was trading at $0.36220 on the Investing.com Index, a loss of 2.33%.

Bitcoin's market cap was last at $69.933B or 53.57% of the total cryptocurrency market cap, while XRP's market cap totaled $14.568B or 11.16% of the total cryptocurrency market value.

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Litecoin Soars 36% As Investors Gain Confidence

DEFINITION of Litecoin

Launched in the year 2011, Litecoin is an alternative cryptocurrency based on the model of Bitcoin. Litecoin was created by an MIT graduate and former Google engineer named Charlie Lee. Litecoin is based on an open source global payment network that is not controlled by any central authority. Litecoin differs from Bitcoins in aspects like faster block generation rate and use of scrypt as a proof of work scheme.

Litecoins were launched with the aim of being the "silver" to Bitcoin's "gold," and have gained much popularity since the time of inception. Litecoin is a peer-to-peer internet currency. It is a fully decentralized open source, global payment network. Litecoin was developed with the aim to improve on Bitcoin's shortcomings, and has earned industry support along with high trade volume and liquidity over the years. The broader differences between the two cryptocurrencies are listed in the table below.

Bitcoin

Litecoin

Creation

2009

2011

Creator

Satoshi Nakamoto

Charles Lee

Coin Limit

21 Million

84 Million

Block Generation Time

10 Minutes

2.5 Minutes

Algorithm

SHA-256

Scrypt

Initial Reward

50 BTC

50 LTC

Current Block Reward (as of June 2014)

25 BTC

50 LTC

Rewards

Halved every 210,000 blocks

Halved every 840,000 blocks

Difficulty Retarget

2016 Block

2016 Block

Litecoin is designed to produce four times as many blocksas Bitcoin (1 new block every 2.5 minutes to Bitcoin's 10), and it also allows for 4x the coin limit, making its main appeal over Bitcoin to do with speed and ease of acquisition. However, because Litecoin uses scrypt(as opposed to Bitcoin'sSHA-2)as a proof-of-work algorithm, the use of mining hardware such as ASIC miners or a GPU mining rig requires significantly more processing power.

Litecoin is consistently among the largest cryptocurrenciesinterms of market capitalization (though still remaining far below that of Bitcoin)and it currently has more than 50 million coins in circulation.

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Litecoin Definition | Investopedia