Bharat Bhise noticed that
many people are getting more and more interested in a recent development in a
cryptocurrency called Litecoin. Considered as Bitcoin’s little brother, one
great way to interpret it is that if Bitcoin were a golden coin, Litecoin would
be its
silver.
But what are the
differences between them? Is one better than the other, and which one should
you invest in?
What is Litecoin?
Contrary to popular
opinion, Litecoin isn’t new, even though it had just recently gained attention.
Litecoin is one of the oldest of the coins on the market. Like Bitcoin, Bharat
Bhise says that this coin is a form of digital payment. Founded eight years ago
by former Google engineer Charlie Lee, his goal was to create a more “everyday”
type of cryptocurrency compared to the heavyweight that was Bitcoin.
How It’s Made
Litecoin, like all other
cryptocurrencies, is not government-issued. Like its big brother Bitcoin, you
get Litecoins by mining. The mining is done by processing a list of Litecoin
transactions, and there is a fixed
supply of them. The whole world only has 84 million Litecoins
forever. Also, unlike Bitcoin, which generates a block or an entry of
transactions all over the world every ten minutes, Bharat Bhise says that the
lighter Litecoin makes one every 2.5 minutes.
Mining Process
Both Bitcoin and Litecoin
use “proof-of-work” consensus. Miners have to use powerful CPUs to
solve cryptographic puzzles. These puzzles need to be extremely difficult;
otherwise, the miners will end up draining the entire Bitcoin supply as they
mine blocks. But the difference with the two is that Litecoin uses a Scrypt
algorithm. While Bitcoin can solve two challenging puzzles (A and B) at the
same time, Litecoin’s process only allows those two puzzles to be done
serially. Memory is what limits Litecoin.
Being simpler than
Bitcoin, Litecoin is seen as something ordinary people can get into with their
day-to-day memory cards. But for Bharat Bhise and other experts, it remains to
be seen whether this lighter load will make Litecoin any more viable a currency
than Bitcoin has been.