Litecoin Price Today - LTC Price Chart & Market Cap | CoinCodex (2024)

Litecoin is an open-sourced, decentralized cryptocurrency that was made as an early Bitcoin spinoff. It is nearly identical in technical aspects, as it uses a Proof-of-Work protocol. It is sometimes used as a pseudo-test for Bitcoin, adopting new protocol changes before they are deployed on Bitcoin. Its supporters like to use the phrase “Litecoin is the Silver to Bitcoin’s Gold.”

LTC was created in 2011 by Charlie Lee, an engineer who worked for Google and Coinbase, with an idea of creating a better version of Bitcoin, optimizing it for use as a medium of exchange. This is why Litecoin has 4 times larger max supply (84,000,000 LTC), with 4 times faster block creation speed (every 2.5 minutes), prioritizing accessibility and transaction speed.

In 2017, Charlie started the Litecoin foundation, which leads all Litecoin development, although many development ideas are provided by the community.

Exchanging LTC for fiat currency is possible in many exchanges, while it is also possible to get BTC and then change it to LTC. Another way is to find someone to trade in person, however, finding someone trustworthy can often be time consuming.

Alternatively, it is possible to mine LTC, however, larger upfront investments are required in order to make profit.

The cryptocurrency market is a high risk environment, so caution is strongly advised. Education and professional analysis can help a lot with making important decisions and are highly recommended, especially for beginners.

Generally, LTC is one of the more popular cryptocurrencies available. With a reliable demand for the product, its value should not experience extreme crashes.

It is highly recommended to start with smaller stakes if you are new to trading. Getting used to the market environment can usually take some time, so some losses should be expected at the start.

Increasing the investment is always possible, however, the general rule is that you should never invest more than you are willing to lose.

Generally, Proof of Work is considered to be a secure protocol, as it requires an enormous amount of work to trick the system. Even though LTC has a lot less hash power in their network, when compared to BTC, a coordinated attack is still nearly impossible.

There have not been any relevant security issues regarding LTC in the past.

LTC coins are generated through a process called mining. A network of decentralized nodes is used to maintain all the operations on the blockchain. These nodes need to do some heavy-duty processing in order to generate the next block that needs to be added to the chain. The first node that manages to do so is awarded with a set amount of LTC.

Each block contains many transactions and is generated roughly every 2.5 minutes. The first node that manages to find the new block address is awarded with a set amount of LTC.

Mining can be extremely profitable if done correctly. It is possible to mine LTC with consumer electronics (GPU, CPU), however, specialized machines have been developed, called ASIC, which are much more efficient. Having this in mind, larger upfront investments are required for a reliable profit.

There is a lot of space for optimization here, which can further increase profit. Getting access to renewable energy through solar panels and wind turbines can often be a worthwhile investment for those willing to pay an extra buck.

Currency halving can affect the price in many ways. It can cause the value to rise as it decreases the amount of coins added to the network.

On the other hand, halving can have a negative effect as it decreases the profit for miners. This can cause some of them to stop mining, which can have many effects on the blockchain, such as increased waiting time, larger fees and general lower quality of life on the network. Most of these factors can cause the price to drop.

All transactions made on the LTC blockchain are publicly available here.

This information is relatively useless to most users, however, a person with a specific knowledge and toolset could easily use this info to track specific transactions.

Currently, average fees are around 0.00028 LTC, which is a fraction of a dollar. Transaction waiting times are around 2,5 minutes, and it is possible to increase the transaction fee for a faster transaction.

However, the network is not under a lot of pressure, so it should not take more than 1-2 blocks (5 minutes) for any transaction to go through.