Santiment’s on-chain data shows over 161 daily transactions exceeding $100,000, the highest since July. From a technical standpoint, LTC price could bleed further towards $63, if the current support level fails to hold. Moreover, the LTC price has dropped over 12% in the past two weeks to trade around $73 on Wednesday, June 19, 2024. As of the date this article was written, the author does not own Bitcoin or Litecoin.
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Once approved, you can deposit your Litecoin and begin selling it. You can sell your Litecoin on the same exchanges where you can purchase it. However, selling your crypto on a centralized exchange is different than selling it on a decentralized one. For example, if you’re selling your Litecoin on an exchange like Kraken, you’ll need to send your LTC to your Kraken address.
Litecoin price LTC
These are just a few of the things you might hear getting tossed around when crypto enthusiasts talk about Litecoin. At first glance, Litecoin doesn’t garner much respect as a top 10 market cap cryptocurrency. However, once you get into the weeds, Litecoin presents an extremely useful and interesting application of the original Bitcoin blockchain. For all the flak Litecoin gets, it’s easy to overlook what it actually is, and what functions it serves.
How does Litecoin work?
Although advertised as accommodating instantaneous transactions, both the Bitcoin and Litecoin networks require time for those transactions to be confirmed by network participants. One of Litecoin’s goals when it was founded was prioritizing transaction speed—it can reportedly handle more than 50 transactions per second. However, Litecoin rarely reaches these speeds, likely because it is used much less than Bitcoin. Right now it’s a bit of a race for which currency will become the one we all use for everyday transactions. That means it’s easier for regular people to earn money from mining Litecoin. Learn how to pay with Litecoin and discover how to spend Litecoin around the world.
- However, its creators set out to distinguish it from Bitcoin by processing transactions faster, distributing newly minted coins more broadly and maintaining a larger circulating supply.
- Then, from November to December 2013, it went on a massive bull run, with Litecoin price hitting a high of $44.73.
- Created by former Google engineer Charlie Lee, Litecoin was one of the first “altcoins”—a name given to cryptocurrencies other than Bitcoin (and sometimes other than Ethereum).
- Click to learn more about recommended wallets and storage solutions.
- In a project led by Charlie Lee, a former Google engineer, Litecoin was released to the public in 2011.
- Litecoin has a block time of just 2.5 minutes and extremely low transaction fees, making it suitable for micro-transactions and point-of-sale payments.
Buying and Selling Litecoin
Litecoin (LTC) is an alternative cryptocurrency created in October 2011 by Charles “Charlie” Lee, a former Google engineer. It was adapted from Bitcoin’s open-source https://www.tokenexus.com/ code but several modifications were made. Like Bitcoin, Litecoin is based on an open-source global payment network that is not controlled by any central authority.
- The comments, opinions, and analyses expressed on Investopedia are for informational purposes only.
- This makes it an attractive alternative to Bitcoin in developing countries, where transaction fees may be the deciding factor on which cryptocurrency to support.
- It’s meant to make cryptocurrency accessible and usable for everyone and is perfectly fine with taking a back-seat role to Bitcoin.
- CoinCentral’s owners, writers, and/or guest post authors may or may not have a vested interest in any of the above projects and businesses.
- Litecoin was released via an open-source client on GitHub on Oct. 7, 2011, and the Litecoin Network went live five days later on Oct. 13, 2011.
- Similar to the SegWit example, the implementation of the Lightning Network on Litecoin was a test to prove that innovations were possible on Bitcoin.
Find general information as well as a list of services and exchanges that support Litecoin at the Litecoin Wiki. Up-to-date network statistics can be found at Litecoin Block Explorer Charts. Source code for Litecoin Core and related projects are available on GitHub. At the time of this writing, Bitcoin transaction fees were significantly higher, at around 3.92% on average, compared with Litecoin’s transaction fees of roughly 0.06%.
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There isn’t much meat on the bones of whatever loyalists are chewing on, but it’s worth noting that it could only be a matter of time before more people start to add Litecoin into their portfolios. Lee appears to have an accessible and open nature compared to the mysterious secretive Satoshi. The fact that Lee is capable of making light (Lite) of the situation is very humanizing.
- Some opponents of the SegWit adoption who advocated for larger Bitcoin block sizes created a Bitcoin hard fork that resulted in Bitcoin Cash.
- In a pool, your rewards are based on your contributions to the work done.
- Even then, your rewards will be very small because pools pay out rewards based on the share of work your miner does.
- For all the flak Litecoin gets, it’s easy to overlook what it actually is, and what functions it serves.
Energy Use and Cost
Scrypt and Litecoin’s PoW require significantly more processing power than SHA-256 and Bitcoin’s PoW. However, Litecoin produces tokens at four times the rate Bitcoin does and has a smaller network, so it uses less energy to produce a block reward (at least in May 2024). A cryptocurrency halving is an event in which the block rewards are cut in half. Litecoin’s halving dates differ from Bitcoin’s because it was released two years later. The reward also halves at different intervals because Litecoin produces new blocks faster than Bitcoin. Most cryptocurrencies can be purchased on cryptocurrency exchanges.
How Much Will Litecoin Be Worth in 5 Years?
At present two thirds have been ‘dug up’, and it will take roughly 100 years for the rest of the currency to be mined. Once you own Litecoin, storing it safely and securely is important. Click to learn more about recommended wallets and storage solutions. As a global organisation we’re always looking for smart and enthusiastic people to join the Foundation. If that’s you, then please fill in the form below and we’ll get back to you ASAP. Mary Flory leads NerdWallet’s growing team of assigning editors at large.