Lee developed Litecoin with the aim to improve on Bitcoin’s shortcomings. The broader differences between the two cryptocurrencies are listed in the table below. It is difficult to determine how investors, traders, cryptocurrency fans, governments, and the general public will treat Litecoin in the future. Cryptocurrency is being scrutinized by governments, more cryptocurrencies are being created every day, and the markets are volatile.
- Litecoin is highly liquid, which makes it a crypto for easier trades.
- Litecoin’s lower price base makes it a good bet for price appreciation relative to the top dogs that make up the bulk of the virtual currency market capitalization.
- Litecoin is the creation of Charlie Lee, a former Google employee and managing director of the Litecoin Foundation.
- Some argue that lower-valued altcoins are better placed to make higher future gains than the giants whose prices already sit atop the crypto heap.
All you need to do now is browse the ‘Trade Markets’ section or type your chosen pair into the search box, for example, ‘LTC/USD. As you can see, there are heaps of factors to consider before taking the plunge and trading Litecoin. You have made it this far, so by now you no doubt have a clear understanding of how to trade Litecoin. If, on the other hand, you expect the price to drop, then you open with a sell order.
Litecoin ran a short-lived mobile app called LitePay a few years ago, which functioned as a crypto competitor to Apple Pay. As a lower-cost option, Litecoin is gaining increasing acceptance among merchants, too. This litecoin merchants heatmap shows its adoption is exploding globally. It isn’t a leap of logic, therefore, to infer that as usage and acceptance of litecoin grow, so will the coin’s market price. Like its crypto counterparts, LTC is a peer-to-peer virtual currency that allows participants to make transactions without an intermediary or central control.
You should consider
whether you understand how leveraged products work and whether
you can afford to take the inherently high risk of losing your money. If you do not understand the risks involved, or if you have any
questions regarding the PrimeXBT products, you should seek
independent financial and/or legal advice if necessary. Virtual Assets are volatile, and their value may fluctuate, which can
lead to potential gains or significant losses. Virtual Assets are not regulated in
the European Union or the wider European Economic Area and users
who hold virtual assets are not covered by the Investor Compensation
Fund (ICF). Firstly, you’ll want to decide if you are just looking to trade Litecoin and perhaps some other cryptocurrencies, or if you’ll be wanting to explore other financial asset classes.
Alex works with cryptocurrency and blockchain-based companies on content strategy and business development. He privately consults entrepreneurs and venture capitalists on movements within the cryptocurrency industry. The fact that Litecoin can hold its own weight when it comes to having a legitimate use case says a lot, especially in a cryptocurrency world with over 700+ alt-coins with dubious purposes. It’s fast and low cost, which puts it ahead of many other crypto networks.
Lee developed scrypt specifically to make large-scale, custom-built hardware attacks on the currency more difficult. Bitcoin’s SHA-256 algorithm does not require a lot of random access memory (RAM) as an impediment to parallel processing, whereas Scrypt does. It’s not clear how much new money will be dragged in once a spot bitcoin ETF trades. One of the main questions is how well a spot bitcoin ETF will track bitcoin and bitcoin futures. Crypto investors are waiting for the Securities and Exchange Commission to approve a raft of spot bitcoin applications, likely Wednesday. Bitcoin also has the benefit of being a near household name by now, whereas Litecoin is much more obscure (especially as new tokens get added to the space regularly).
What Is Litecoin?
Because of the wider adoption of LTC, there are quite a few ways to store it. If you are storing a large amount your best bet is always to go with a hardware wallet like a Ledger Nano S or Trezor. If you plan to trade it regularly and/or use it on a daily basis there are some more convenient options. You could go with the official desktop wallet for Windows, Mac, and Linux. The price topped out at around $350 at the end of 2017 and the range-bound process seems to be playing out again. If history is anything to go by we may see prices dwindle for a year or two before the bulls return.
About Litecoin
Making trades out of the emotions of fear or greed can result in financial loss. Through a trading plan, you can determine whether you https://broker-review.org/ want to become a day trader or a long-term trader. Day trading is where you trade against the daily price movements of Litecoin.
Depending on the app or exchange you’re using, the buy transaction could be as simple as a click, or you might have to enter the ticker (LTC) and indicate the amount you want to purchase. Sign up for our weekly non-boring newsletter about money, markets, and more. Its most prominent feature aims to reduce trading costs on decentralized exchanges.
How Does Litecoin Work?
That’s a hard limit; once all the Litecoin has been mined, no more can be created. Similar to Bitcoin, the amount of Litecoin released as a reward decreases over time to ensure that the supply never eclipses 84 million. Zaid-Ul-Haq is a freelance writer and editor who specializes in blockchain, robotics, IoT, and other emerging technologies. He currently writes about cryptocurrencies for Wealthsimple as well as having written for Analytics Insight and Crypto Briefing. Zaid has a Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science from Comsats University, Pakistan. Stock trading platform Webull has landed in Canada with $2.99 trades.
Why Bitcoin Cash, Ethereum Classic, and Litecoin Are Surging Today
He was one of the five employees there and was the director of engineering when he left in 2017. Charlie has a master’s degree in computer science from MIT and worked as a software engineer for Google for almost 6 years. An avid poker player, he was one of thousands affected by the Black Friday crackdown on online poker by US authorities in 2011. Seeing how regulators choked out online poker sites by barring payment providers from working with them is what made him “realize the importance of the freedom of money”.
Trading Litecoin
However, Litecoin’s supply is much higher, and it has been attributed to LTC’s low price. EToro accepts credit and debit cards, and also e-wallets like PayPal, Skrill, and Neteller. Whilst bank account deposits are also accepted, you should note this is the slower option.
Despite the similarities between these two cryptocurrencies, both BTC and LTC employ different mining algorithms. Bitcoin uses the power-intensive SHA-256 hashing algorithm, while Litecoin adopted the Scrypt hashing algorithm, which uses fewer resources (but is still very power-hungry). Litecoin (LTC) is widely considered to be the first alternative cryptocurrency (altcoin) and is often called the “little brother” of Bitcoin because it came out three years after Bitcoin’s launch in 2008. It fulfills a similar purpose—to process payments on a decentralized, peer-to-peer network—but is quicker and better suited to small transactions. Charlie Lee, an employee at Google at the time, released Litecoin in October 2011 designed to be a quicker, lower transactional cost cryptocurrency, intended to make relatively low value transactions.
One of Litecoin’s original missions was to discourage enterprise-sized miners from gaining control of the mining process by using a different encryption method. However, miners quickly adapted their specialized machines and continued to grow their mining capacity. This includes the Bitcoin halving, which is due in April and which could boost market-wide bullishness across the board, including for LTC. Litecoin’s more muted rise today appears to be tied more to sector-specific tailwinds than anything else.
There is can be slight variations, due to the time taken to execute a trade and the speed at which prices move, but ultimately a market order can be thought of as what you see is what you get. If you’re still learning how to trade Litecoin, then a conservative alpari review approach is advised. Litecoin is highly liquid, which makes it a crypto for easier trades. In fact, Litecoin holders will find that merchants such as Newegg, SlingTV and even nonprofits like the American Red Cross are happy to accept their cryptocurrency.
