Cryptocurrency and blockchain technology took the world by storm through Bitcoin. Today, bitcoin is the digital currency upon which the future of humankind hinges and this is not even a joke. But the early stages of the now, at the time of press, $66,702.36, went through a lot of turmoil to reach this point. And the trouble with the coin itself, such as the use of GPUs for mining and rendering CPUs obsolete, gave way for the promotion of other cryptocurrencies, aka alternate coins aka altcoins. One of these altcoins was Litecoin.
Litecoin is a peer-to-peer Internet currency that makes it possible to make payments without any cost, almost instantly and all across the globe. It is based on the Proof-of-Work cryptography and uses scrypt, unlike SHA-256, as its key derivative function.
The Litecoin was released by Charlie Lee, who was the Engineering Director at Coinbase, via an open-source client on GitHub on the seventh of October, 2011 and the following week, Litecoin went live. It was a fork for Bitcoin source code. But it did have its differences. One was the decreased time for the generation of blocks (it was about 150 seconds), increasing the threshold for the maximum number of coins, different hashing algorithm,s, and incrementally different GUI.
The rewards for mining a block are 12.5 LTC. But this amount gets halved at about every four years. In blocks, it would be 840,000 blocks. By calculation, the LTC has a plan of 84 million LTC in circulation by the end of its mining. And this is 4 times the currency unit as Bitcoin.
Litecoin (LTC) Price Movement
Being lauded as the silver counter-part to Bitcoin, it is now lagging quite far behind. In fact, meme coins have garnered more popularity than this pioneer. But the LTC coin is still holding strong. Currently, at the time when this article is being put down into words, the current value of the coin is $264.43 with a low of the day of about 16.71%. This might be mainly due to the current uptick of Bitcoin and it reaching its all-time high value. But other than the BTC effect, LTC still has investors enamored. The Reverse Risk Indicator shows the confidence of the investors. It seems to be the highest it has ever been over the past couple of years.
All in all, there do seem to be indicators that LTC is going to grow. It might even hit the $500 mark according to one pundit.
