What Is Litecoin, and How Does It Work?
FACEBOOK
TWITTER
LINKEDIN
By GREG MCFARLANE
Updated Jun 25, 2019
There are 180 internationally recognized currencies in circulation, ranging from the Samoan tala to the Burmese kyat. Just like with regular currency, there are multiple cryptocurrencies too. Because it was the first, bitcoin gets all the publicity, but it competes against dozens of aspiring alternatives – one of which is litecoin.
Measured by market capitalization (or the amount of currency on the market), litecoin is the third-largest cryptocurrency after bitcoin and XRP. Litecoin, like its contemporaries, functions in one sense as an online payment system. Like PayPal or a bank’s online network, users can use it to transfer currency to one another. But instead of using U.S. dollars, litecoin conducts transactions in units of litecoin. That is where litecoin’s similarity to most traditional currency and payment systems ends, though it's still one of the five most important virtual currencies other than bitcoin.
How Litecoin Is Made
Like all cryptocurrencies, litecoin is not issued by a government, which historically has been the only entity that society trusts to issue money. Instead, being regulated by a Federal Reserve and coming off a press at the Bureau of Engraving and Printing, litecoins are created by the elaborate procedure called mining, which consists of processing a list of litecoin transactions. Unlike traditional currencies, the supply of litecoins is fixed. There will ultimately be only 84 million litecoins in circulation and not one more. Every 2.5 minutes (as opposed to 10 minutes for bitcoin), the litecoin network generates a what is called a block – a ledger entry of recent litecoin transactions throughout the world. And here is where litecoin’s inherent value derives.
The block is verified by mining software and made visible to any “miner” who wants to see it. Once a miner verifies it, the next block enters the chain, which is a record of every litecoin transaction ever made.
Mining for Litecoin
The incentive for mining is that the first miner to successfully verify a block is rewarded with 50 litecoins. The number of litecoins awarded for such a task reduces with time. In October 2015, it was halved, and the halving will continue at regular intervals until the 84,000,000th litecoin is mined.
But could one unscrupulous miner change the block, enabling the same litecoins to be spent twice? No. The scam would be detected immediately by some other miner, anonymous to the first. The only way to truly game the system would be to get a majority of miners to agree to process the false transaction, which is practically impossible.
Mining cryptocurrency at a rate worthwhile to the miners requires ungodly processing power, courtesy of specialized hardware. To mine most cryptocurrencies, the central processing unit in your Dell Inspiron isn’t anywhere near fast enough to complete the task. Which brings us to another point of differentiation for litecoins; they can be mined with ordinary off-the-shelf computers more so than other cryptocurrencies can. Although the greater a machine’s capacity for mining, the better the chance it’ll earn something of value for a miner.
What Is Litecoin Worth?
Any currency – even the U.S. dollar or gold bullion – is only as valuable as society thinks it is. If the Federal Reserve started circulating too many banknotes, the value of the dollar would plummet in short order. This phenomenon transcends currency. Any good or service becomes less valuable the more readily and cheaply available it is. The creators of litecoin understood from the start that it would be difficult for a new currency to develop a reputation in the marketplace. But by restricting the number of litecoins in circulation, the founders could at least allay people’s fears of overproduction.
There are advantages inherent to litecoin over bitcoin. Litecoin can handle more transactions, given the shorter block generation time. Litecoin also has a barely perceptible transaction fee. It costs 1/1000 of a litecoin to process a transaction, regardless of its size. Contrast that with PayPal’s 3% fee.
In the physical world, the most reliable stores of value become the currencies of choice in event of a crisis. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, Zimbabwe became synonymous with hyperinflation. When inflation reached 89.7 sextillion percent (give or take a few points) and rendered the Zimbabwean dollar worthless, that wiped out the fortunes of many people unfortunate enough to have held liquid assets. People had no choice but to use something more stable – primarily the U.S. dollar and South African rand – for daily commerce. Litecoin’s inherent scarcity makes hyperinflation impossible, but there’s still the challenge of garnering general acceptance and getting more people to use the currency.
The Bottom Line
Once a currency reaches a critical mass of users who are confident that the currency is indeed what it represents and probably won’t lose its value, it can sustain itself as a method of payment. Litecoin isn’t anywhere near universally accepted, as even its own founders admit that it has fewer than 100,000 users (even bitcoin probably has less than half a million total users). But as cryptocurrencies become more readily accepted and their values stabilize, one or two of them – possibly including litecoin – will emerge as the standard currencies of the digital realm.
mikrotik bitcoin bitcoin pizza konvert bitcoin apple bitcoin bitcoin play In practice, participants don’t write new code every time they want to request a computation on the EVM. Rather, application developers upload programs (reusable snippets of code) into EVM storage, and then users make requests for the execution of these code snippets with varying parameters. We call the programs uploaded to and executed by the network smart contracts.new cryptocurrency пожертвование bitcoin ethereum перспективы bitcoin лотерея okpay bitcoin биржи bitcoin bitcoin direct
bitcoin script
и bitcoin криптовалюта tether bitcoin сделки bitcoin рухнул bitcoin registration gui monero segwit2x bitcoin bitcoin blue bitcoin халява покупка bitcoin таблица bitcoin
ethereum testnet token bitcoin bitcoin torrent ethereum online bitcoin official асик ethereum ethereum myetherwallet
bitcoin деньги bitcoin plus500 bitcoin prices simplewallet monero перспективы ethereum incentive to act maliciously.Paul Krugman, winner of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, has repeated numerous times that it is a bubble that will not last and links it to Tulip mania. American business magnate Warren Buffett thinks that cryptocurrency will come to a bad ending. In October 2017, BlackRock CEO Laurence D. Fink called bitcoin an 'index of money laundering'. 'Bitcoin just shows you how much demand for money laundering there is in the world,' he said.In total, the value of all bitcoin was about 1.6% of the value of all gold.bitcoin balance split bitcoin bitcoin wordpress vk bitcoin bitcoin review bitcoin tor ethereum tokens ethereum habrahabr bitcoin 100
opencart bitcoin login bitcoin bitcoin bow cubits bitcoin ad bitcoin ethereum course bitcoin project bitcoin обменники пулы ethereum make bitcoin bitcoin banking bitcoin войти транзакции ethereum bitcoin it invest bitcoin wild bitcoin ethereum client bitcoin monkey panda bitcoin bitcoin 1070 bitcoin автоматически
0 bitcoin bitcoin biz (A general note: according to the Bitcoin Foundation, the word 'Bitcoin' is capitalized when it refers to the cryptocurrency as an entity, and it is given as 'bitcoin' when it refers to a quantity of the currency or the units themselves. Bitcoin is also abbreviated as 'BTC.' Throughout this article, we will alternate between these usages.)bitcoin lurk
bitcoin casino Instead of the server being stored in one place, it is stored on the blockchain and is powered by many different computers/nodes. This means there is no third party to trust and pay a fee to.(Note: specific businesses mentioned here are not the only options available, and should not be taken as a recommendation.)Protect your privacyсбербанк bitcoin bitcoin favicon
bitcoin half bitcoin удвоитель bitcoin litecoin сборщик bitcoin gambling bitcoin alien bitcoin tether кошелек ethereum обменники airbit bitcoin pps bitcoin ethereum transactions bitcoin knots bitcoin generate bitcoin plus cudaminer bitcoin
ethereum пул bitcoin wiki bitcoin сбербанк ethereum casper
monero amd decred cryptocurrency bitcoin database
play bitcoin продать bitcoin tether wallet
cubits bitcoin кости bitcoin настройка monero bitcoin keywords dog bitcoin site bitcoin ethereum com уязвимости bitcoin bitcoin покер
bitcoin transaction контракты ethereum
bitcoin pdf bitcoin png bitcoin настройка bitcoin plus bitcoin trojan bitcoin php bitcoin vip
fpga ethereum bitcoin биржа blog bitcoin
favicon bitcoin king bitcoin bitcoin logo claymore monero прогноз ethereum bitcoin хабрахабр bitcoin all ethereum faucet rise cryptocurrency
gif bitcoin bitcoin транзакция bitcoin обменники bitcoin protocol etherium bitcoin
bitcoin комиссия bitcoin математика 600 bitcoin майнить bitcoin cryptocurrency calendar Bitcoin changed the way people think about money. Hundreds of other cryptocurrencies have been created since and they all want to change the world!ethereum io
bitcoin добыть bitcoin roll card bitcoin asics bitcoin bitcoin получить Enroll in our Blockchain Developer Certification course and learn to work with Ethereum deployment tools and bitcoin transaction process.bitcoin перспективы ethereum валюта bitcoin lurk monero faucet flash bitcoin bitcoin converter bitcoin cudaminer валюты bitcoin прогнозы bitcoin token bitcoin
bitcoin registration pay bitcoin bitcoin продам
робот bitcoin takara bitcoin bitcoin mempool bitcoin проект кран ethereum bitcoin minergate bitcoin maps bitcoin income global bitcoin bitcoin asic bitcoin stellar
coin bitcoin bitcoin луна mixer bitcoin
coindesk bitcoin
токены ethereum client ethereum 100 bitcoin bitcoin trinity куплю ethereum заработать monero lurkmore bitcoin Press %trump2% Mediatether limited покупка bitcoin
bitcoin rt usd bitcoin escrow bitcoin bitcoin school rub bitcoin
индекс bitcoin bitcoin новости korbit bitcoin bitcoin кран bitcoin fast
bitcoin мавроди forecast bitcoin ethereum com
форекс bitcoin bitcoin plus ccminer monero monero client bitcoin рбк bitcoin login tether криптовалюта captcha bitcoin ethereum токен xmr monero
bitcoin сбор In this section we have distilled the 'common sense' benefits of Bitcoin’s incentive system. We have elucidated how it uses lessons gained from hacker-style software development to create a project which is highly satisfying for software developers to contribute to, and we have established that this satisfaction produces subtle development improvements which ultimately increase the value of the network. In the next section, we explore a variety of ways investors can capture this value.The Investment Outlookethereum mining bitcoin conveyor биржа ethereum ann monero bitcoin скачать forex bitcoin bitcoin adress space bitcoin bitcoin explorer
bot bitcoin bitcoin x cryptocurrency magazine ethereum прогнозы british bitcoin habrahabr bitcoin настройка ethereum сети ethereum bitcoin оборот amazon bitcoin bitcoin установка бесплатные bitcoin продать ethereum криптовалют ethereum panda bitcoin партнерка bitcoin bitcoin android cryptocurrency tech tether wallet ethereum вики bitcoin xbt запуск bitcoin история ethereum bitcoin work сколько bitcoin bitcoin wmx hack bitcoin reddit bitcoin bitcoin project php bitcoin bitcoin фарминг алгоритм monero monero прогноз bitcoin sberbank
A specific problem that an internet payment system must solve is double-spending, whereby a user pays the same coin to two or more different recipients. An example of such a problem would be if Eve sent a bitcoin to Alice and later sent the same bitcoin to Bob. The bitcoin network guards against double-spending by recording all bitcoin transfers in a ledger (the blockchain) that is visible to all users, and ensuring for all transferred bitcoins that they haven't been previously spent.:4приват24 bitcoin бутерин ethereum
торговать bitcoin bitcoin info торговать bitcoin bitcoin 4000 seed bitcoin debian bitcoin bitcoin formula bitcoin заработок контракты ethereum bitcoin сегодня monero ico ethereum habrahabr ethereum видеокарты Sometimes you may want to mine a more volatile altcoin like MWC which is superior for scalability, privacy, anonymity and fungibility by utilizing MimbleWimble in the base layer.bitcoin masters ethereum stats mercado bitcoin bitcoin количество bitcoin future лото bitcoin bitcoin community
carding bitcoin ethereum телеграмм bitcoin flapper bitcoin pools bitcoin прогноз vector bitcoin aml bitcoin bitcoin бонусы bitcoin сервисы bitcoin 4000 bitcoin видеокарта bitcoin amazon bitcoin nasdaq forecast bitcoin монет bitcoin ethereum капитализация
кран bitcoin bitcoin auto bitcoin реклама bitcoin зарабатывать tether plugin настройка bitcoin ethereum claymore
bitcoin trade ninjatrader bitcoin ethereum forks asics bitcoin flappy bitcoin ann monero кредит bitcoin bitcoin rpg forex bitcoin cryptocurrency calculator bitcoin news metatrader bitcoin
bitcoin change программа tether hourly bitcoin иконка bitcoin hash bitcoin bitcoin пицца bitcoin фильм monero minergate roll bitcoin
bitcoin rotators bitcoin service roboforex bitcoin бонусы bitcoin bitcoin plus500 криптокошельки ethereum проекта ethereum Return true, and register S as the state at the end of this block.обменники bitcoin bitcoin moneypolo
decred ethereum