How to buy Litecoin(LTC) Guide

What is Litecoin (LTC)?

Litecoin is a decentralized open-source blockchain and is widely considered the first successful alternative coin (or altcoin) in the market. Technically, Litecoin was not the first altcoin to exist in the market; there were many that came before Litecoin, but all of them died soon because they were not convincing enough so that crypto users could adopt them en mass. Launched in 2011, Litecoin has the aim to be “the silver to Bitcoin’s gold”. Though whether the goal of Litecoin is achieved is up for debate, it is no doubt among the biggest cryptocurrencies by market capitalization.

Litecoin was a hard fork from Bitcoin that was created to remedy the shortcomings of the original. The major differences of Litecoin are that

(1) it was fairlaunched,

(2) block is generated in less time,

(3) total supply of token is increased,

(4) different hashing algorithm, and

(5) different GUI (graphic user interface).

These technical improvements lead to faster speed, lower fee, and more accessible for the masses.

Regarding the creator of Litecoin, he is an MIT graduate and former Google engineer, Charlie Lee. Lee invented Litecoin as “mainly a fun side project” and got a job at Coinbase not long after. However, in 2017, he quit Coinbase to work on Litecoin full-time.

How Litecoin (LTC) Works

Litecoin is one of the few popular cryptocurrencies that still use the PoW consensus algorithm because PoW is often criticized for huge energy consumption, low speed, and lack of scalability. Yet, the PoW consensus of Litecoin is quite different. Instead of using the SHA-256 hashing algorithm of Bitcoin, Litecoin implements a different hashing algorithm called Scrypt. It has a special time-memory trade-off to enhance the decentralization in mining and avoid the situation where a few miners with better computing power claim too many tokens. Basically speaking, a miner can increase speed while having to use more memory, or they can use less memory while doing more work and taking longer. This means that it would cost either a lot of time or a lot of resources to perform operations on Litecoin, thus making a large-scale attack much less likely. In fact, Litecoin has not had any major exploits.

Moreover, this inherent time-memory compromise of Scrypt allows easier mining for those with limited computing power. In Litecoin, custom hardware does not necessarily have the edge over non-custom hardware. For example, mining Bitcoin with a GPU is twenty times faster than with a CPU (a more general-purpose hardware), while mining Litecoin with a GPU is only ten times faster than with a CPU.

Other than the fundamental difference in hashing algorithm, Litecoin has each block added every 2.5 minute instead of every 10 minute like Bitcoin. This means that transactions of Litecoin are technically processed four times faster than in Bitcoin.

How Many LTC Tokens Are There in Circulation?

The main token of the Litecoin network has the ticker LTC. This token has a total supply of 84,000,000 to ensure that the last LTC is mined at the same time as when the last Bitcoin is mined. At the moment, there are 71,224,181.28 LTC in circulation.

LTC implements a halving mechanism to control inflation. Yet to make Litecoin’s halving event happen at roughly the same time as Bitcoin's, 840,000 blocks must pass before each halving event on Litecoin while the number is 210,000 on Bitcoin. LTC has gone through two halving events, the first one in 2015 and the second one in 2019. At the beginning, each block rewarded 50 LTC, then decreased to 25 LTC and 12.5 LTC after each halving. Currently, the reward for mining is 12.5 LTC per block. The next halving event of LTC will happen in 2023 and the mining reward per block will be reduced to 6.25 LTC then.

How to Buy Litecoin (LTC)

Consider investing in Litecoin (LTC)? It only takes 2 minutes to create an account on Bitget and start trading LTC.

Check out the available LTC trading pairs on Bitget!

Futures Market

LTCUSDT

LTCUSD

Spot Market

LTCUSDT

LTCUSDC

LTCETH

Litecoin Resources

Whitepaper

Website