Litecoin Review

Litecoin review: Beginners guide

Litecoin (LTC) : Faster Bitcoin with less features

Industry type: Internet spending and commerce.

Litecoin is one of the older and more established coins on the market that is based on the original Bitcoin source code with changes made specifically to facilitate faster transaction speeds and lower fees than it’s original predecessor.

What gives it value?:

Good for shop owners and customers.
Its developments can be applied to the Bitcoin network.
Higher transaction speeds and lower transaction fees.
Blocks take roughly 2.5 minutes to be created.
Decentralised and open sourced.

Interesting Technology:

LTC is a source code fork of Bitcoin, meaning it shares many of the basic foundations of Bitcoin but does not share the same blockchain.
The Scrypt Algorithm is what miners use on the LTC network to process blocks on the blockchain. The nature of Scrypt helps to produce faster transaction speeds and is generally more accessible to new miners.
Segregated Witness (Segwit) increases the speed of transactions by excluding the unnecessary data needed to confirm a single transaction.

Notable team:

Charlie Lee created Litecoin by cloning and making adjustments to the Bitcoin code where he saw room for improvement. Lee was a former employee of Google who worked on the Youtube Mobile and Chrome OS projects.
Xinxi Wang is one of the LTC core developers and board of directors of the Litecoin foundation. Wang is successful programmer entrepreneur and a respected voice in the crypto community.
The Litecoin core development team maintains the LTC network, whose role is one of custodianship rather than ownership.

Notable partnerships:

The Litecoin foundation is a not-for-profit based in Singapore whose mission is to develop Litecoin and blockchain technologies for the good of the world.
US-based Aliant merchant services were the first payment partners to register and use Litecoin in their payment services.
Tapjets, a platform that allows for private aeroplane bookings allows their customers to pay for their services in Litecoin.

Litecoin Review: The Good

Fast transaction speeds.
Low transaction fees.
Popular with merchants and customers as a spending currency.
Promising future partnerships.
World Class reputable team.

Litecoin Review: The Bad

There is debate over the legitimacy of Litecoins decentralisation as Charlie Lee has control over the network. Lee argues though that by Litecoin having a leader, decisions can be made faster and more accurately in a highly competitive market. In 2017, Charlie sold his entire LTC holdings to avoid a conflict of interest in overseeing the currencies development.
Controversy surrounds SegWit and the data it chooses to discard as unimportant for the sake of faster transactions.
Although the Scrypt Algorithm increases the speed of transactions, it is also energy intensive as it requires more memory and processing power to function.

Future Roadmap:

Further implementation and development of the Lightning Network.
TenX and Litecoin are developing a crypto debit card.
Rumoured future partnership with Facebook to use Litecoin for payments.
Charlie Lee envisions Litecoin to become used as ‘digital silver,’ second to Bitcoin that is currently classed as ‘digital gold’.

CONCLUSION:

In my opinion, Litecoin is currently the strongest coin on the market in terms of a fast spending currency for merchant and customer transactions. There are controversies surrounding its use of off-chain solutions, such as Segregated Witness and the Lightning network. Regardless, Litecoin is a popular choice and it’s creator and development team are trusted and respected members of the cryptocurrency community.

Litecoin Price:

The current Litecoin price, market cap and charts.

Local exchanges:

Coinspot: www.coinspot.com.au

CoinTree: www.cointree.com.au

Independent Reserve Exchange: www.independentreserve.com

Overseas exchanges:

CoinBase: www.coinbase.com

CEX.io: https://cex.io/

Bitstamp: www.bitstamp.net

Coinmama: www.coinmama.com

Gemini: www.gemini.com