In the last couple of years, there has been dramatic fluctuations in public interest in the cryptocurrencies. It has drawn the attention of investors, who have increasingly turned to it as the years passed. Their focus has mainly been on bitcoins – a digital currency almost synonymous with increasing people’s wealth and making millionaires.
After the foundations of bitcoin was laid, hundreds of similar digital currencies have been forked or created from it. LTC (Litecoin), one of the bitcoin forks, is such an altcoin (a term used for all cryptocurrencies other than bitcoin). Though Litecoin has the same verification method and blockchain as bitcoin, a number of major differences need to considered to understand if it is the right fit for your goals and interests.
Bitcoins and Litecoin: A brief overview
Bitcoin, the first cryptocurrency, has been around since 2009. In all these years, it has gone from a novelty to a controversial commodity to an exchangeable currency. It is based on community and decentralized computing power for maintaining the security and validity of the centralized database known as blockchain.
Charlie Lee, a former Google engineer, launched Litecoin in 2011 as a ‘lite version’ of bitcoins. Litecoin has many of bitcoin’s features that the developers considered useful for bitcoins.
Major differences between bitcoins and Litecoin
The experienced experts at Bitcoin Profit outline the following important differences between bitcoins and Litecoin.
Market Cap:
As bitcoin is mined by major farms and big mining pools, it enjoys more popularity. Also, it has such a high demand that the crypto-to-dollar exchange rate is pretty high as well. The greater demand and smaller supply of bitcoins have made Litecoin get a comparatively smaller market capacity.
Distribution:
The chief difference between Litecoin and bitcoin is the total coins that these cryptocurrencies can produce. The bitcoin network stops at 21 million coins, and Litecoin is able to reach 84 million coins.
Theoretically, it sounds like a major benefit for Litecoin. In any case, generally, demand and supply direct the prices for investments and commodities, along with investor and consumer sentiments. Both tend to believe that bitcoins go with their finance goals, values, and interests. Thus, bitcoin prices reflect that.
Speed of transaction:
Though transactions are pretty instantaneous on both the networks, time is needed for other network participants to confirm the transactions. Litecoin is known to prioritize the speed of transaction.
The average transaction confirmation time (i.e., time needed to verify a block and add it to the blockchain) for bitcoins is nearly nine minutes for each transaction. But it tends to vary greatly based on network traffic. The same figure for Litecoin is around two to three minutes.
The endnote
Whether bitcoin or Litecoin is better depends on your financial goals, your ideas about cryptocurrency, and what you plan to do with the coins. Bitcoins aren’t generated as fast as Litecoin, though they are worth more. Bitcoins are better when you are looking for more value for each coin. On the other hand, Litecoin may be better when you want coins at a lower value.
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