It is reported that cryptocurrency has become more and more popular in recent years. One of the earliest cryptocurrencies created is Lite coin, so it is one of the most popular coins. However, you may have heard of this cryptocurrency. Do you want to know what is Lite Coin? How does Lettercoin work? Now let's learn about Lettercoin.
What is Lite Coin?
LTC is one of the most recognized blockchain and digital assets in the cryptocurrency market. This virtual currency was created by Charlie Lee in 2011 and is considered the gold of Bitcoin. One of the organizations behind Letcoin is the Litecon Foundation. According to him, Lite Coin is a digital asset, which is based on the premise of fast confirmation time and low transaction costs. This is why Letcoin is used to pay for goods and services.
Lite coin is also one of the oldest virtual currencies in this field. A few years ago, it was one of Bitcoin's main competitors. Today, Litcoin is the fifth largest cryptocurrency in terms of market value, second only to Bitcoin (BTC), Ethereum (ETH), XRP and Bitcoin Cash (BCH).
How does Lettercoin work?
After trying to create his own digital asset Fairbix, Lee released Litecoin. Fairbix failed, however, the Lettercoin attracted the attention of many people. Although virtual currency is very similar to Bitcoin, it is obviously different from the latter.
Litecoin was released on GitHub as an open source client in 2011. A few days later, Litecoin went online. Compared with Bitcoin, the total supply of Lite Coin is 84 million, and the mining algorithm is Scrypt, a 2.5 minute block. On the contrary, the total supply of Bitcoin is 21 million, the mining algorithm is called SHA-256, and the blocking time is 10 minutes.
The difficulty of Letcoin is adjusted every 2016 yuan or three and a half days. This means that miners tend to adjust the difficulty of Lite coin faster than Bitcoin, and Bitcoin's difficulty is adjusted every two weeks. Although Bitcoin and Lite Coin work in a similar way, Lite Coin lags behind in halving. Bitcoin will be halved for the third time next year, and Litcoin has recently experienced a second overall reward reduction. Every four years, Bitcoin and Lite Coin will experience a decrease in the rewards received by miners, which is one of the most important attributes of some cryptocurrencies, especially PoW currencies. After 840000 Lite coins and 210000 Bitcoin, the number of newly issued coins decreased by 50%.
With the decrease of digital currency issuance and the increase of demand, if there is a demand shock in the market, the price of virtual currency is expected to rise faster. The LTC released by miners to the market will be reduced for more investors to use.
Litecoin also realizes atomic exchange, allowing individuals to exchange coins across chains without relying on third parties. By implementing a hash time lock contract, it is possible to send payments after a pre agreed deadline. Some atom exchanges have been carried out between Litecoin and Decred (DCR) and Vertcoin (VTC).
The Proof of Working Algorithm on Lite Coin
The PoW algorithm owned by Litecoin can maintain the dispersion of the network, and can also run confirmation transactions. Miners use their computing power to solve cryptographic problems. Once a mine block is discovered by a miner and all transactions are processed, the miner will receive LTC rewards, which is currently 12.5 LTC per block.
If Bitcoin miners want to mine the most popular digital assets, they must buy a special machine called ASIC. Similarly, you need special equipment to get my Lettercoin and remain competitive in the mining industry. As mentioned earlier, compared with Bitcoin using SHA 256, Litcoin uses the Scrypt algorithm. The goal behind the Scrypt algorithm is to ensure that everyone can mine Lite Coins, not just a few individuals with ASIC miners. Although it is possible to use CPU and GPU to mine Litecoin, it is very inefficient now, and encryption ASICs dominate the market.
Transaction speed and cost
The trading speed of Lite Coin is faster than that of Lite Coin, and the charges are lower. The blocking time of Letcoin is usually close to 2.5 minutes, fluctuating in a narrow range between 2.2 and 2.75 minutes. This is very useful for many merchants and those who accept Lite Coin. They will receive digital assets with two confirmations within 5 minutes.
This is an advantage over Bitcoin, which takes ten minutes to receive a confirmation. In addition, the fees paid by users are much cheaper than those on Bitcoin networks. At present, the average cost of each LTC transaction is US $0.059, while the average transaction cost of Bitcoin is US $1.54.
Furthermore, Lite Coin is also one of the most liquid digital currencies in the market. It is possible to buy or sell it in a fast and safe way at different exchanges around the country.
In order to increase the number of transactions that can be processed by the network, Litecoin introduces SegWit, which allows transactions to be smaller, thus increasing the space of each block.
Although digital currency offers fast and cheap transactions, Charlie Lee and the developers of Lite Coin had to work hard to avoid the flood. These attacks are related to a malicious entity that processes several transactions to congest the network. This increases costs and slows down the entire network.
Confidential transactions
Confidential trading is one of the most desirable functions on the Letcoin network. Today, digital assets such as Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Bitcoin cash register all processed transactions on their respective blockchains. This does not allow users to keep privacy every time they transfer money. In fact, you can see which address sent the funds, the amount of the transaction, the fees paid, and who received the transaction. Companies responsible for analyzing blockchain data can link IP, email, etc. to specific addresses.
This is why Charlie Lee wrote on Twitter that substitutability is the only attribute of reliable currency that Bitcoin and Lite coin currently lack. This is why he decided to improve the substitutability of Lettercoin by increasing confidential transactions.
In order to achieve this, the network will experience soft bifurcation. In addition, they are also exploring making bulletproof MimbleWimble with extended block, which is similar to the concept of side chain. Although there is no specific release date, Kai Fu Lee explained that we intend to release it sometime in 2019. Through this implementation, Litecoin will be able to protect the privacy of those trading funds and protect their data, including trading funds. Although this is very positive for the whole network, it is worth mentioning that there will be an important increase in transaction costs.
How to buy and where to store the Lettercoin?
Digital currency can be obtained from many cryptocurrency exchanges around the world. Since Lite Coin is not a small virtual currency and has been operating in the market for a long time, it can be purchased on a large number of encryption platforms.
The best places to buy Lite Coin include Coin Security, Bitcoin Base, Bibox, Huabi Global and KuCoin. Beginners usually know where to buy LTC. This is why we have written a guide for interested people and investors to buy Lite Coins.
Through coin security, you can purchase LTCs with Bitcoin (BTC), Ethereum (ETH), Paxos Standard (PAX), TrueUSD (TUSD), USD Coin (USDC) and Tether (USDT). Lite coins account for 2.5% of the total trading volume of Cian.
Users who want to hold LTC can use the cryptocurrency wallet that supports Litecoin. Although the exchange provides users with wallets, the private key is managed by the exchange, which means that if the exchange is attacked by hackers or stops operation, the funds will be lost.
summary
Lite coin is one of the most recognized and oldest digital currencies in the cryptocurrency market. It is possible for it to remain flexible over the years, and how it may emulate Bitcoin and propose several improvements. This digital currency has achieved many updates later used by Bitcoin, including isolated witnesses, confidential transactions or atomic swaps in the future.