Bitcoin was unleashed upon the world over a decade ago and within a couple of years of its release it started to inspire individuals to launch similar projects like Charlie Lee.
Charlie Lee was one of the former Google engineer who decided to have a split or a fork from Bitcoin and called it Litecoin (LTC).
Litecoin is similar to Bitcoin, but with a few key differences.
Transaction speed - when it comes to speed, Litecoin wins against Bitcoin. On average, it takes about 10 minutes to confirm a Bitcoin block but Litecoin confirmations come in 4 times faster confirming at 2 and half minutes on average.
Transaction fees - Litecoin's fee only cost $0.0024 for every transaction. While Bitcoin has a median transaction fee of about $0.68.
You got to keep in mind though that these USD estimates shift all the time depending on the underlying value of the asset and other network characteristics. So, while the price in USD may shift, the takeaway here is Litecoin is much cheaper to send than B
Charlie Lee's mission
A key improvement that Charlie Lee wanted to emphasize with the release of Litecoin was its resistance to ASIC mining centralization.
ASIC miners are basically supercomputers that are really expensive, they consume a lot of energy and are out of reach for most people to operate profitably. This leads to big players taking a larger piece of Bitcoin with the little people left out. While Script, Litecoin's mining algorithm did fend off Asec for quite sometime. It eventually fell victim to ASIC mining as manufacturers were able to figure out a way to manufacturer SCRIPT.
Ironically, this has led to Litecoin mining becoming more centralized than Bitcoin mining with just give mining pool accounting for about 70% of Litecoin hash rate.
While Bitcoin's hash rate distribution isn't some decentralized utopia, it's still a bit more decentralized than Litecoin with the top 5 mining pools making up around 60% of Bitcoin's total hash rate.
So while the case can be made that Bitcoin and Litecoin both have pretty centralized mining processes, Bitcoin is slightly less centralized. But again, one of the main reasons for Litecoin's creation was to prevent mining centralization.
Network hash rate comparison
The significance here of network hash rate is that the higher the hash rate is, the more secure the network. This is because if a network has a high hash rate, it's more resistant to a 51% attack. Any attacker would need enough computing power to control more than 50% of the hash rate to even stand a chance, which is not easy.
When your money is on the line, the security of the network is paramount and Bitcoin's hash rate is orders of magnitude higher than Litecoin's.
And that's made Bitcoin is the more secure network.
My say
Even if there already lots of splits or fork in the the Bitcoin network, still Bitcoin is reigning at the top and dominating all of the the other cryptocurrencies. When the current price of $18,935 as of the making of this article, there is none asset that have surpassed Bitcoin's dominance in the field of digital currency.
What are other differences between these two leading cryptocurrency asset and which is better in your opinion?
If Bitcoin can find a scaling solution to help lower transaction fees such as the Lightning Network, is it going to make Litecoin obsolete?
I would be very grateful if you share some knowledge as I am also open in learning more about cryptocurrencies.
Image sources :
Lead Image : profitconfidential.com
Charlie Lee : en.wikipedia.org
Litecoin : thecoinshoppe.ca
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This more a hallucination than a vision. Not gonna happen but Litecoin can find its way among the other thousands of micropayment cryptocurrencies like Dash, XRP, Doge, Nano, Banano, etc.
Good luck with it in the race to become the world's currency of choice. Obviously being fast and cheap to send is not enough as you can easily see from the low adoption of the cryptocurrencies I mentioned above.
And you know Litecoin has no marketing, it's purely a speculative (payment) currency like most cryptocurrencies with no other use case.
Again, good luck with that vision.