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The Best Litecoin (LTC) Alternatives: 10 Reasons Why LTC Is Better Than BTC

 

Litecoin is a peer-to-peer digital currency that was created in October 2011 by former Google employee, Charlie Lee. It’s based on the Bitcoin protocol but differs from Bitcoin in that it can be mined with consumer grade hardware (e.g. CPUs and GPUs) rather than custom hardware such as ASICs. It also has faster transaction confirmation times and better storage efficiency than Bitcoin. Here are 10 reasons why Litecoin is the best Bitcoin alternative.

 

Litecoin as a Bitcoin alternative

1. Currency pegged to the US dollar Litecoin currently has an economy-weighted dollar value that’s pegged 1:1 to the dollar. This means that Litecoin is actually stronger than Bitcoin, and as long as it doesn’t appreciate too much, it should be able to maintain its value. This compares very favourably to Bitcoin, which may appreciate wildly, but can always fall back to a value that is lower than the US dollar. It’s also a positive that Litecoin is already tied to a specific country’s currency. This ensures that every Litecoin has a unique country’s value and means that the currency is fairly strong and stable. 2.

 

Speedy transactions all over the world

The Litecoin protocol provides low-latency transactions all over the world – the number of confirmations is roughly half that of Bitcoin. With LTC fees ranging from 0.005 LTC to 1 LTC on average, Litecoin users pay almost zero transaction fees and the transactions are often posted up to 2 hours faster. Reliable mining Bitcoin mining is becoming more competitive, since the ASICs designed for mining have been released. Each ASIC can mine a maximum of 2.5 BTC every 10 minutes, which means that the profitability of mining is quickly declining. With the more reliable Litecoin network, the problem of the sudden rise in the network’s difficulty is less likely.

 

Storage efficiency

Litecoin is stored in blocks, which are encrypted on the Bitcoin blockchain. Each block has a lock time of 1,000 seconds, which results in an approximate 10-minute delay between the time a transaction is confirmed and its actual entry into the block. Bitcoin blocks take about 10 minutes to validate, but Litecoin blocks take approximately 4-8 minutes. Transaction confirmation times Since Bitcoin transactions require miners to verify their validity, mining litecoin requires a process called ‘mining.’ To accomplish this, a miner uses their GPU or CPU to solve a puzzle every time a block is generated. If they are the first to solve it, they get the reward of a block.

 

LTC is ASIC resistant

Bitmain’s new ASICs are based on Bitcoin mining and cost $3,500. In contrast, the Litecoin Miner from 11.11.11 is only $150 and achieves nearly 8.8 MH/s, meaning it can mine Litecoin faster than Bitmain’s new Bitmain Antminer S9 which is priced at $3000 and able to mine Bitcoin at around 6.5 MH/s. You can mine Litecoin with a consumer grade GPU or CPU, the latter is great for those using an older CPU with an i5-2500k. It’s more scalable The Litecoin network is slightly bigger than Bitcoin and the blocks mined are slightly bigger as well. This makes it easier to process Litecoin transactions as well as more reliable. It’s private Bitcoin is open source and anyone can inspect transactions and blocks, so, while it is very secure, it isn’t completely private.

 

Scarcity of coins

Litecoin was originally released on October 2, 2011, with a total supply of 84 million coins. At press time, the total supply is in excess of 84 million, but some of the coins have already been lost, staked, or sent to community members. A faster confirmation time Litecoin’s confirmation time, a measure of the time taken to verify a transaction, is significantly faster than that of Bitcoin. Transaction confirmations on the Bitcoin network average 10 minutes, while Litecoin transactions can be confirmed within one minute. Since these confirmations can be verified at any time in real-time, the only way to prevent this from occurring is to spend all of your coins at once, but for individuals looking to diversify, this is not a risk they should be taking.

 

LTC has 21 million total supply and BTC has 21 million total supply (same as USD)

Bitcoin supply is capped at 21 million coins. So the maximum total supply is also 21 million, where as Litecoin has a max supply of approximately 84 million coins. This means that Litecoin can produce more coins than BTC, but if the currency becomes more popular then these coins will be diluted. This is why the coins are referred to as deflationary currency. It was very easy for me to buy my first 10 Litecoin through my Coinbase account at $13.99 each, instead of the Bitcoin limit of $1000 per coin. So the $500 was really a very good investment, and I’ve made other purchases since then on top of my LTC stash. There is also other ways to buy LTC for payment, including off exchanges. My LTC stash.

 

LTC has SegWit support

Many Bitcoin users have been concerned with SegWit (Segregation-of-Power) which was activated on Bitcoin in August 2017. SegWit makes the blockchain more scalable by separating it into two separate blockchains, with the original chain being a part of Bitcoin and a smaller chain that contains all the transactions and in theory will soon be able to process transactions in seconds. Many of the Bitcoin Core developers and companies have voiced their support of SegWit, which many Litecoin users want in the future as well. But the big question is whether or not Bitcoin miners will agree to it. As I explained in my article ‘Why Bitcoin Cash (BCH) Is Better Than Bitcoin’, Bitcoin Cash (BCH) is another Bitcoin fork that was introduced last August.

 

What is SegWit?

Before getting into the main reasons why Litecoin is better than Bitcoin, it’s important to understand the main difference between Bitcoin and Litecoin. Namely, SegWit. SegWit is an upgrade proposed by some Bitcoin developers in August 2017 that aims to increase the capacity of Bitcoin, reduce transaction fees, and increase speed by allowing nodes to create blocks that can contain up to 4 megabytes of transactions. Some crypto proponents say that SegWit would help Bitcoin finally become Bitcoin 2.0. However, some Bitcoin community members say that SegWit is a distraction and that Bitcoin’s problems cannot be solved by an unrelated upgrade like SegWit.

 

Benefits of SegWit for Litecoin and Bitcoin

Bitcoin users can already attest to how much faster transactions have been processed in the Bitcoin protocol with SegWit, but what does that mean for Litecoin? With SegWit, Litecoin is expected to support much higher transaction speeds in the future as well as better scaling in the future. A developer in the Bitcoin community recently claimed that Litecoin is the most adaptable for higher transaction speeds. Here’s what the original Satoshi Nakamoto paper said: SegWit is a scaling solution for Bitcoin that introduces two new rules: one to increase block sizes from one megabyte to 2 megabytes and one to reduce the reference transaction size from one megabyte to one hundred bytes.

 

Conclusion

Despite Litecoin having bigger volume than the Bitcoin Network, its total coin supply is far lower. This means that Litecoin has less power to fundamentally shift the market. Moreover, if the rise in transaction fees is any indication, the other two cryptocurrencies are experiencing the same problem. This leaves Bitcoin as the go-to currency for cryptocurriencies, while the other two provide good alternative investment vehicles.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]

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