HomeCryptoAltcoinLitecoin (LTC): what is it, how does it work and how to...

Litecoin (LTC): what is it, how does it work and how to buy it

At the moment, litecoin (LTC) ranks fourth on CoinMarketCap, with a market capitalisation approaching $6 billion. What litecoin is and how to buy it is one of the most common questions in crypto, even mining is very popular for this cryptocurrency. Here’s everything you need to know about LTC.

The story of Litecoin (LTC)

It was initially announced in 2011, its goal was to become the digital silver in a market where bitcoin (BTC) represents gold. It was born from an idea of Charlie Lee, former Google employee and MIT graduate, who immediately admitted that he was inspired by Bitcoin and called it “a brilliant invention“.

What is litecoin (LTC)?

LTC is a P2P (peer-to-peer) cryptocurrency based on an open-source system completely unrelated to the control of any central authority. This is a feature of strong independence that now unites the majority of cryptocurrencies in circulation.

The technology behind Litecoin and its source code have been taken into consideration for the creation of other cryptocurrencies including, for example, Dogecoin and Feathercoin.

The mining of litecoin (LTC)

After explaining what litecoin (LTC) is, the other important aspect to take into account is that of mining.

The so-called mining reward is fixed at 25 LTC for each confirmed block, an event that occurs every 2.5 minutes. However, in the next few days, thanks to the procedure called halving, this reward will be halved. It will thus go from 25 to 12.5 LTC. The halving takes place every 850,000 mined blocks.

The number of litecoins in circulation has already been established at the time of creation: the cap will be 84 million LTC.

For mining enthusiasts, this cryptocurrency differs from bitcoin (BTC) mainly because of the hash algorithm: SHA-256 is the one of BTC while LTC uses the so-called scrypt algorithm, which favours systems that use high RAM (random access memory) rather than just processing power. The scrypt algorithm is also known as memory hard problem.

Where to buy litecoin (LTC)

Litecoin (LTC) can be bought on various exchanges, some of the most famous are certainly Coinbase, Binance and Kraken. Since it is one of the most famous cryptocurrencies on the market, it is not difficult to find it on different and lesser-known platforms.

The list of all the exchanges that support litecoin is available on CoinMarketCap.

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