As it’s well known in the crypto world, “Litecoin is the ‘silver’ as Bitcoin is the ‘gold’”, yet such a saying is not groundless. As one of the earliest cryptos in the trading market, Litecoin has become a regular part of the portfolios of major investment institutions. Grayscale, for example, included LTC in its asset holding list long ago, and its current LTC holdings amount to $159 million. Thanks to some improvements to its underlying blockchain technology that address the limitations of Bitcoin, Litecoin became one of the most popular cryptocurrencies and a more convenient payment choice for small transactions in daily life.
Compared with Bitcoin, which needs 10 minutes to generate a block, Litecoin only needs 2.5 minutes. Therefore, with faster transaction confirmation and extremely low transaction fees, Litecoin has become a good payment choice for small transactions and for businesses. That is exactly consistent with Litecoin’s founder Charlie Lee’s vision of making Litecoin a “lite” version of Bitcoin.
And the Litecoin network is expected to produce 84 million Litecoin, four times the number of coins generated by the Bitcoin network. The difference between the two is that the Litecoin workload proof mechanism uses the scrypt encryption algorithm, while Bitcoin uses the sha256 algorithm. The scrypt algorithm takes longer to calculate and random access memory (RAM). This algorithm prevents 51% hacks by making it hard for hashrates to aggregate and miners are more scattered. Because the scrypt algorithm of Litecoin is different from that of Bitcoin, Bitcoin mining machines cannot be used to mine Litecoin, which protects Litecoin from hacks and provides sustainability for its development.
As of March 2022, 69.85 million LTC have been mined out of the total number of 84 million. The Litecoin Foundation recently estimated that it will take more than 100 years for LTC to be fully diluted, which will be around the year 2140. Because as part of the plan to reduce the block reward by half, the number of LTC mined in every block will decrease every four years. Currently, miners can get 12.5 LTC as rewards for every block generated.
The total market capitalization of Litecoin is now as high as $7.3 billion (ranked the 21th on CoinMarketCap). The whole network hashrate is 417.33TH/s (as of March 15 2022). But Litecoin mining is not supported by many mining pools, which does have a lot to do with Litecoin’s scrypt algorithm.
Although Litecoin and Bitcoin cannot share one mining machine due to their different algorithms, they have one thing in common: they both have their exclusive mining machines. Bitcoin has ASIC miners, while Litecoin has Antminer L7, Innosilicon A6+, etc. As can be seen from ViaBTC’s mining profit rankings, the daily revenue of the latest Antminer L7 is quite considerable.
To give back to our customers for their long-term support of ViaBTC and increase the income of miners by mining LTC, ViaBTC pool launched merged mining of LTC and DOGE in 2019, that is, mining LTC to get DOGE as rewards. If you’re interested in merged mining, you can bookmark this article.
Although Litecoin is often ridiculed as the biggest “altcoin” of Bitcoin, according to relevant data, currently more than 2,000 merchants or stores around the world have accepted Litecoin as a payment method, and Litecoin is second only to Bitcoin in terms of global usage, making itself one of the most widely accepted cryptos. As of the writing of this article, the LTC price is $103.41.
ViaBTC’s Official Channels
Website: https://www.viabtc.net/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/ViaBTC
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/viabtc
Telegram: https://t.me/TheViaBTC
