Litecoin Beats Bitcoin’s Price in 2018

The next generation of altcoins, however, are purpose-built to replace Bitcoin in a variety of arenas, from pure currency to the Internet of Things to artificial intelligence to digital platforms. Litecoin may very well supplant Bitcoin in some areas, but it will be hard-pressed to work as a catchall solution for the hordes of alternative coins looking to take its place. For virtually every Litecoin use case, there is an altcoin that does it better, faster, or more cheaply. Litecoin’s creation stems from a dispute between Bitcoin developer Charlie Lee and the mainline Bitcoin community. Between February and June 2011, Bitcoin’s price rose from $1 to $31, a huge increase. To resolve this issue, he created a hard fork of Bitcoin’s code to form a new, faster, and cheaper coin dubbed Litecoin. Litecoin’s supply was set at 84 million, almost four times Bitcoin’s 21 million, to rein in per-coin pricing. Its transaction time was reduced to about a fourth of Bitcoin’s, and its block reward doubled.

While Bitcoin mining uses the SHA-256 hashing algorithm, which requires ASIC microchip technology, Litecoin uses the Scrypt algorithm. Because Scrypt requires a larger working memory, most ASICs makers have been barred from developing a suitable technology. Read more about dash mining calculator here. Unlike many other altcoins, when it first started, Litecoin was not too far behind Bitcoin. He got serious about Litecoin earlier this year, when he announced via Twitter plans to leave cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase during the summer. Lee, a less shadowy figure than the pseudonymous Nakamoto, first got involved in Bitcoin in 2011. Not long after, he launched Litecoin, though not with the intention of actually creating an alternative cryptocurrency at first. The higher number of Litecoins, meanwhile, could make it psychologically more attractive to buy small-ticket items using the cryptocurrency. (A client is a piece of software that accesses a service made available by a server.) It is basically a fork of the Bitcoin Core client.
Still, Lee has kept Litecoin simple and similar in technical ways to Bitcoin so that the cryptocurrency could “merge in” Bitcoin bug fixes with minimal effort. Use the calculator to convert real-time prices between all available cryptocurrencies and fiat. Comparison between silver and gold should come as no surprise, as Litecoin aims to move away from the reported value hoarding model to becoming a decentralized medium of transferring value for practical and everyday use. View the total and circulating supply of Litecoin, including details on how the supplies are calculated. All content on Blockonomi.com is provided solely for informational purposes, and is not an offer to buy or sell or a solicitation of an offer to buy or sell any security, product, service or investment. The opinions expressed in this Site do not constitute investment advice and independent financial advice should be sought where appropriate. However, both BTC and LTC – alongside ETH – are cornerstones of the exchange base pairing market. After all, perfection is often the enemy of the good, and Litecoin just might be good enough to retain a foothold in the crypto world for years to come.
Walmart learned of the release only after reporters called it to confirm accounts from some news outlets that had published information based on the release, a company spokesman, Randy Hargrove, said. The retailer later put out a statement saying that the release was incorrect and that it had no partnership with Litecoin. Digital currencies briefly jumped in value after a fake release said the retailer would start accepting the little-used Litecoin. Litecoin is designed to support a more even distribution of hash power compared to Bitcoin. Applied to mining pools and even the smallest groups of miners, this should help the platform achieved the desired level of mining decentralization. The goal is to have all Litecoin tokens in circulation have the same value, as newly created tokens are sometimes considered more valuable compared to those that have been used in illegal operations. Despite describing itself as “lite” in its name, Litecoin was actually designed to take on cryptocurrency heavyweights, particularly Bitcoin. One can say that Bitcoin’s shadow hovers above many of Litecoin’s features which were developed in response to what was perceived as failing of the core model used by the world’s first mainstream crypto. While Nakamoto is no longer vocal about Bitcoin, leading current supporters to interpret his seminal white paper, those with questions about Litecoin need only ask Lee about his vision of cryptocurrency. One reason why Litecoin supporters didn’t ditch the nascent coin for Bitcoin is the different mining process, requiring hardware that is more widely available.

Phony Walmart News Release Signals a Crypto Pump

A list of the top Litecoin markets across all crypto exchanges based on the highest 24h trading volume, with their current price. This is the very same vehicle that pushed Bitcoin to prominence via the aforementioned Silk Road. Litecoin traffic makes up about 30 percent of dark web transactions, second only to Bitcoin. While this might seem like a rather unsavory route to success, dark web adoption is the same portal Bitcoin used to get mainstream acceptance. If nothing else, it works as a proof of concept; while Litecoin certainly has some security and anonymity vulnerabilities, guaranteeing it can’t stay in the dark forever, its use as a currency is tried and true. In other words, if it works on the dark web for buying sundry illegal or unethical materials, it should work just fine in legitimate marketplaces. Very little tech has survived from 2008 unchanged, from mobile phones to laptops to solar panels. Although its introduction was revolutionary, its underlying code has aged somewhat poorly.

This may very well change as the market grows and adapts, and Litecoin appears to have carved out a niche for itself as a recognizable and widely used medium of exchange for alternative coins. There is a few other projects with this stated goal, but none can boast the pedigree or the market capitalization of Litecoin. Furthermore, Bitcoin and Litecoin share heavy coding elements, and so projects explicitly designed for one coin or another are often interoperable. We’re going to take a brief tour of the history between these two cryptocurrency giants, examine the state of the market, and try to figure out what the future holds for both currencies. Gary Gensler, the S.E.C. chairman, recently called on Congress to grant financial regulators more authority over cryptocurrency products and exchanges. LTCs are readily available for trading on various cryptocurrency exchanges, including Binance and CoinSmart. Acquired tokens can be stored in the officially supported wallet available for Windows, Linux and Mac platforms. Paired with the Litecoin’s implementation of Lightning Network and Segregated Witness , the developers hope that this feature should make Litecoin a viable payment option for both the merchants and regular users.

Litecoin News

Trying to beat Bitcoin at its own game meant that Litecoin had to go for cheaper transaction rates. As an alternative, Litecoin proposed bringing the same or better functionality at lower costs and reduced dependence on peak traffic price spikes. With Litecoin, the transaction fees are closely linked to the size of a transaction and the block size involved, leaving the transaction amount out of the calculation. Yet, the developers promise that new upgrades to the Litecoin should reduce these fees to approximately USD 0.005, starting from the one launched in May 2019. All of this should make Litecoin more acceptable to people who feel that transaction fees for small daily purchases such as groceries simply add up too fast.

Based on Litecoin’s implementation of this technology, the currencies will be just swapped, with the help of the platform hashed timelock contracts . Instead of the standard channels which use timelocks, the HTLC upgrades these by introducing so-called hashlocks to the mixture. They enable the operation of payment channels which support transactions verified by means of cryptographic proofs. In addition, parties to a transaction can forfeit payment at any time and send it back to the paying party. Designed as an answer to Bitcoin’s perceived shortcomings, Litecoin is promoted as the cryptocurrency offering faster transactions, lower fees and higher numbers of coins in circulation. The top crypto exchanges that have Litecoin available for trading, ranked by 24h trading volume and the current price. Litecoin is also popular in China, and many market observers believe that China and Asian markets in general will lead the next big wave of cryptocurrency adoption.

Litecoin Price Chart LTC

While halving is meant to slow issuance in order to make LTCs less exposed to inflation, the traders can usually expect a period of increased volatility, while the miners will be earning lower rewards. Making the Litecoin more resistant to flood attacks is promoted as one of this currency’s strengths. These attacks involved flooding a network with spam transactions, causing the blocks to fill up and overwhelm the blockchain. In the case of Bitcoin, one attack of this type from July 2015 involved flooding the mempool and causing significant delays in processing regular transactions. One of Litecoin’s flagship features is its support for atomic swaps which allow for the exchange of tokens across chains with no need for intermediaries.

This will be done by charging a sender a fee for each minuscule output that is created. Based on the patch introduced to Litecoin after the attack on Bitcoin, the cost of performing this spam attack would actually outweigh any potential gain for the spammer. But companies such as Zeus and Flower Technology are beginning to bring ASICs aimed at Scrypt to the market.

Bitcoin has Satoshi Nakamoto Litecoin on the other hand

He’s an ex-Google employee who had the vision to create a lighter version of Bitcoin. An overview showing the statistics of Litecoin, such as the base and quote currency, the rank, and trading volume. By early July, Bitcoin had settled to a per-coin price of about $6,600, while Litecoin had sunk to just $82. Bitcoin’s market cap hovered at $113 billion, while Litecoin’s market cap was about $4.7 billion. In a statement on Twitter, the foundation said that a quote purporting to be from Litecoin’s creator, Charlie Lee, had been fabricated and that a member of the foundation’s social media team had sent a Twitter message by mistake. The fake Walmart release even led to some confusion at the Litecoin Foundation, which briefly posted it on its Twitter account. The foundation later deleted the message and posted that it had not entered into a partnership with Walmart. The Securities and Exchange Commission is likely to investigate a hoax Walmart news release about Litecoin because Walmart is publicly traded, lawyers said. To prevent the existence of “tainted” coins, the Litecoin’s team pin their hopes on what is already planned for their Confidential Transaction feature, set to be implemented in late 2019. With it, the recipients of the specific funds can decide not to accept the transaction based on its earlier history and refuse to do business with suspect parties altogether.

After falling prey to a fake release scandal involving a pharmaceutical company in 2010, Business Wire, which is owned by Warren E. Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway, prevented companies from using email to submit a release. As of August 2018, the cryptocurrency market as a whole is still suffering from the effects of the so-called Long January, a months-long hangover stemming from the surprise December 2017 runup to all-time-high prices. In the December–January time frame, Bitcoin crested $20,000 per coin, while Litecoin reached a high-water mark of $366. At the moment, all alternative coins – including Litecoin – are highly dependent on the price of Bitcoin. The market simply has not achieved widespread adoption, and no coin even comes close to challenging Bitcoin’s financial position at the top of the heap. Bitcoin has been the public face of all cryptocurrencies since it first appeared on the scene in the shadowy Satoshi Nakamoto‘s white paper in 2008. Its subsequent adoption by the Silk Road black market and meteoric rise in price, which turned pizza change into millions of dollars, forever cemented it as the coin to watch. By midmorning, the service had notified users that the announcement should be disregarded. Bloomberg and Reuters, two of the media outlets that had written up the release, retracted and updated their articles.

For the longest time, Litecoin held the position of fifth-largest cryptocurrency by market cap, though it has since been knocked aside by EOS. Litecoin is now in sixth place and remains amongst the top ten cryptocurrencies in circulation. It was developed in 2011 through a bitcoin fork by former Google employee Charlie Lee, making it older than bitcoin’s primary competitor Ethereum. From there, Lee was able to create his own genesis block and start a new digital currency with no previous transactions under its belt.

Litecoin is a peer-to-peer decentralized digital currency with an instant, near zero-cost payment service to peers across the world. It features a faster transaction confirmation status, along with a refined storage competency. The average block mining speed in Litecoin is 2.5 minutes, compared to bitcoin’s 10 minutes. The only big negative in the Litecoin arena is, ironically, its similarity to Bitcoin. As a cheaper, faster Bitcoin, Litecoin presents investors with major advantages over the current king of crypto.

Litecoin is one of the oldest cryptocurrencies in existence and launched in October 2011 as a fork of Bitcoin. It shares many of the same characteristics as Bitcoin but strives to be lighter and faster and as a result, exhibits shorter block generation times of approximately 2.5 minutes. This allows for both faster transaction clearance and in turn, lower transaction fees than Bitcoin. Litecoin is the native crypto of the Litecoin platform which went live in October 2011. Charlie Lee, a former Google’s employee, and his colleagues created Litecoin as a “software fork” of Bitcoin core client. While it does not share a common transaction history with it, it is still based on Bitcoin’s code. Lee’s main ambition revolved around creating a global decentralized payment network similar to Bitcoin, which would perform its role without shortcomings supposedly plaguing Bitcoin. Lee summarized this by claiming that Litecoin will be called the “silver to Bitcoin’s gold”.

As of September 2019, more than 63 million LTC tokens were found in circulation, out of its max supply of 84 million units. At the same time, the currency’s market cap stood at more than USD 4 billion, placing the currency in the top 5 coin club based on its value. In august 2019, Litecoin underwent its second halving, meaning that its rate of new coin supply is now half of what it was – down from LTC 25 to LTC 12.5 per mined Litecoin blockchain block. The currency’s first halving took place on August 25, 2015, when the Litecoin block mining reward was reduced from LTC 50 to 25 LTC.
Some of the efforts to be undertaken by Litecoin in this segment involve finding ways to integrate 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. With digital currency Bitcoin taking the spotlight in 2017, it’s hard to remember the other cryptocurrencies that have been growing in its shadow. It is also one of the more liquid coins, and easier to trade to fiat when compared with other altcoins. It further offers a little more diversification than other forms of digital money in that it is considerably more affordable than bitcoin, giving it more room for growth. While the announcement appeared authentic — even including a statement purportedly from Walmart’s chief executive, Doug McMillon — there were clues it was fake. For one, it listed a contact email address at walmart-corp.com, an unauthorized website. Also, the press contact named in the release does not work in Walmart’s media division. And Walmart normally uses Business Wire for its official announcements, Mr. Hargrove said.

Cross-industry integration is yet another promotional hallmark of Litecoin which its developers want to turn into the currency’s strengths. The platform aims to operate akin to an open software, which is freely accepting technological improvements while choosing not to neglect a loyal community built around it. Bitcoin’s 24-hour volume in July 2018 was about $5.2 billion, dwarfing Litecoin’s $264 million. In fact, more Bitcoins in terms of U.S. dollars are moved each day than Litecoin’s entire market capitalization. The number 2 and 3 positions on CoinMarketCap as of July 2018 are occupied by platform coin Ethereum and foreign currency lubricant Ripple, respectively. Both boast market caps many times that of Litecoin, which settled into the number 6 global market capitalization position. Lastly, it is appropriate that Litecoin would garner comparisons to silver, while bitcoin is placed against gold. One ounce of gold costs approximately 80 ounces of silver, while at press time, one bitcoin is worth roughly 85 LTC. The amount of Litecoin meandering through the cryptocurrency arena is about 3.35 times larger than that of bitcoin, and the final total will be four times larger. Litecoin is also mined much faster than bitcoin, which means that the price of Litecoin should eventually rise faster than the price of bitcoin, according to the report.

• In the case of Bitcoin, one attack of this type from July 2015 involved flooding the mempool and causing significant delays in processing regular transactions.
• This will be done by charging a sender a fee for each minuscule output that is created.
• At the same time, the currency’s market cap stood at more than USD 4 billion, placing the currency in the top 5 coin club based on its value.
• The goal is to have all Litecoin tokens in circulation have the same value, as newly created tokens are sometimes considered more valuable compared to those that have been used in illegal operations.

The Chinese and Korean governments have both loosened their stance toward cryptocurrencies in general, opening the door to potentially billions of new investors. Litecoin boasts a more accessible price point – for the time being, anyway – than Bitcoin, making it more attractive to new investors who want to own an entire coin. The fake release was published on GlobeNewswire, a communication services company that provides companies with a platform to disseminate announcements. GlobeNewswire, whose parent company, Intrado, is owned by the big private equity firm Apollo Global Management, competes with PR Newswire and Business Wire.
This eliminates the need to go through exchanges and pay their fees for the simple operations involving exchanging LTC for other cryptos. There doesn’t seem to be a single event—though the recent surge in interest surrounding cryptocurrencies may have pushed some investors into becoming more adventurous. Some investors may also think the price of bitcoin is overdone—and are seeking other investment opportunities. Meanwhile, Litecoin only became somewhat easier to purchase earlier this year, with Coinbase adding the cryptocurrency to its listing. Furthermore, Litecoin mining is significantly cheaper than Bitcoin mining in terms of electrical cost. The downside is that the scrypt used to mine Litecoin is a stripped-down version of the Bitcoin scrypt, and so it may be inherently less secure. After all, security is one of the main reasons for using cryptocurrency in the first place, Bitcoin supporters argue, and compromising security to make spending Litecoin easier is a potential recipe for disaster. Most big corporate news wire companies have secure systems for letting companies submit releases for distribution.

Even the Twitter account for the Litecoin Foundation, which promotes the use of the currency, touted the release in a post. The value of Litecoin jumped more than 30 percent before Walmart put out a statement saying the news was false. This would result in having payments whose origins and destinations are obfuscated to any outside parties. This implementation by LTC should offer better confidentiality of transactions https://www.beaxy.com/exchange/btc-usd/ made with this currency. The developers also claim that this should not affect the Litecoin’s Lightning Network compatibility. Over time, Litecoin has focused more on privacy, adding the pledge to protect anonymity to the list of its priorities. Confidential Transactions are a planned new feature for the Litecoin network, with an option to have these implemented via soft forks instead of the hard ones.

Bitcoin was never really designed to handle the kind of traffic the network currently demands, and so speed and scalability issues have plagued the Bitcoin community since shortly after its rise to prominence. This has a resulted in at least 30 legitimate forks of the coin’s open-source code, almost all geared toward improving Bitcoin’s average transaction speed. Coinbase, one of the cryptocurrency exchanges where investors can buy and sell Litecoin, said in a statement that it worked to actively debunk misinformation, and posted an article refuting the hoax. In 2010, another news wire service published a fake release saying the cereal company General Mills was the subject of a federal investigation, which the company wasn’t. In 2009, federal securities regulators charged a stockbroker with disseminating false releases to manipulate the shares of several public companies. In that case, the S.E.C. filed an enforcement action just three weeks after the scheme began. The newest thing in finance had apparently fallen prey to one of the oldest investor hoaxes around — a classic pump-and-dump scheme. Someone issued a false news release, likely taking advantage of the general hoopla around cryptocurrency to stoke enthusiasm for Litecoin, which is far less popular than Bitcoin and other digital currencies. Litecoin’s price jumped to about $230 from around $175 right after the news, then fell back and traded at around $180 after Walmart refuted the release.