LTC: The King of Altcoins

Today, we will cover LTC (Litecoin), which is a famous altcoin. LTC is called an altcoin because it copies BTC and shares the same technical implementation with it. The phrase “Bitcoin is gold, Litecoin is silver” has caught on for a while in the crypto industry.

That said, how did LTC stand out from the many altcoins in the crypto market? Why is it so much more successful than its peers? Let’s now dive into the specifics.

In the early days, after BTC went viral, the world saw countless copycats. Of course, only a few outstanding projects survived. To date, there are at least 30 types of altcoins, including Litecoin, Primecoin, Biocoin, Ripple, MegaCoin, and Applecoin, and LTC has become the most famous one.

LTC was created by Charlie Lee, an MIT graduate and a former Google employee. Inspired by BTC, Charlie invented LTC in 2011. Although LTC shares the same technical implementation of BTC, it is based on an open-source encryption protocol in terms of creation and transfer, which is not governed by any central authority. However, LTC differs from BTC in that Bitcoin adopts the SHA-256 algorithm, while Litecoin uses the Scrypt algorithm, which enables efficient mining with consumer-level hardware and faster transaction confirmation (2.5 minutes on average). Furthermore, the Litecoin network is expected to produce 84 million Litecoins.

Although LTC is an altcoin, it has its own mission and purpose, which is to improve BTC. Moreover, it is also considered to be “the most successful virtual currency” in terms of improving the Bitcoin algorithm. LTC significantly differs from BTC in three aspects:

1. The LTC network processes a block every 2.5 minutes (instead of BTC’s 10 minutes), which enables faster transaction confirmation;

2. The LTC network is expected to produce 84 million Litecoins, which is four times larger than the total supply of BTC;

3. LTC uses Scrypt, an encryption algorithm first proposed by Colin Percival, in its PoW algorithm, which makes it easier to mine LTC with ordinary computers compared with BTCmining.

In short, unlike BTC’s system, LTC features faster transaction confirmation, greater network capacity, and higher efficiency, making it stand out from the many altcoins.

Charlie Lee, the founder of LTC, sold all his LTC holdings in December 2017, which shocked the entire crypto community. At the time, Charlie Lee said on social media that he had sold and donated all of his LTC but did not release the specific amount and price.

Back then, LTC had been trending upward, and the price had once peaked at $375 before Charlie Lee cleared his holding, which was a 7,000% growth compared with the figure recorded at the beginning of the year. Some investors questioned whether Charlie Lee lost confidence in the future of LTC and wanted to exit. After Charlie made his move, both LTC and BTC plunged in 2018, and the crypto market became sluggish.

After selling all his LTC holding, Charlie Lee said in an interview that he “regrets selling all the Litecoins” because, from a short-term perspective, his holding was sold at a price lower than the peak price. That said, he still believed the move to be the right call when considered in the long run and said that he would return to obscurity after LTC made it.

For more information about LTC (Litecoin), please go to:

Official website: https://litecoin.org

Block explorer: https://explorer.coinex.com/ltc

Market cap ranking: https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/litecoin