Bharat Bhise Explains Litecoin

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.