Bitcoin is, without a doubt, the most famous and most valuable cryptocurrency. Holding the first place on the podium has earned it the nickname “the gold of cryptocurrencies.” However, it is not the only cryptocurrency that exists. Although its reign is indisputable, the fight for second place and to be the digital silver has been (and is) the fiercest.
Litecon (LTC) was a strong candidate for this second place and today, despite having lost prominence compared to other projects, it is a crypto to take into account.
What is Litecoin
Litecoin is an altcoin (alternative currency to Bitcoin) that was launched to the public on October 7, 2011 by Charlie Lee, a Google employee at the time. The launch was completely open source through a repository on Github. The crypto was quickly adopted by major exchanges.
During its first years, Litecoin experienced significant growth, doubling its value in 24 hours in November 2013. In 2014 the possibility of double mining was launched along with Dogecoin, so users were able to mine both coins at the same time.
It reached $360 per coin in 2017, before the price massacre in December of that year. However, its ATH of $410 did not arrive until the 2021 bull market, almost 10 years after its creation. This year, a press release spread online stating that Walmart and Litecoin had signed a collaboration agreement. This caused the price of LTC to rise by 30%, but this information was later proven to be false.
How Litecoin works
Litecoin emerged with the objective of being a lighter and faster option than BTC. These characteristics are achieved thanks to a faster block generation than Bitcoin due to the Scrypt algorithm; two and a half minutes compared to 10 for BTC, making transactions, on average, four times faster.
This speed of transactions and reduced fees compared to other cryptos, such as Bitcoin or Ethereum during periods of congestion, make Litecoin a suitable currency for small purchases, which was one of the key ideas behind the project.
This, added to its greater ease of being mined at home without specialized hardware thanks to Scrypt, positioned Litecoin as a crypto designed to be used on a daily basis. At that time, the mining of the main cryptocurrencies (mostly BTC) depended largely on the processing power provided by GPUs, leaving aside CPUs due to their lower efficiency.
A crypto called Tenebrix incorporated a proof of work that favored the possibility of being mined with CPU, thus using resources that BTC miners did not use. This crypto did not come to fruition, but Litecoin took advantage of part of its code (the aforementioned Scrypt) so that LTC could be mined efficiently using the CPU. Despite this, Currently, domestic Litecoin mining is not viable without specialized equipment like ASICS.
How to buy Litecoin
Litecoin is one of the longest-lived cryptocurrencies, and therefore It is extremely easy to find it on almost any exchange. Unlike the memecoins of the moment, it is not necessary to go to obscure decentralized exchanges; Binance, Kraken or Coinbase offer it in a more accessible way.
In fact, buying Litecoin can be obtained in just a few seconds if we already have a Coinbase account. We just have to link our bank card, go to the buy tab and choose how many LTC we want to purchase. This would be the basic and uncomplicated way, but the ways of buying and selling crypto can be much more sophisticated; place sell and buy orders, use leverage, etc…
As with any cryptocurrency, buying LTC is not risk-free. It is a financial asset that has the volatility typical of the crypto sector, so any amount of money invested is likely to be lost forever. This is why it is extremely important to do as much research as possible before investing a single cent.
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