Over the past few years, cryptocurrencies such as lightcoin and bitcoin have gained great popularity. More and more people are starting to realize that this is a real investment opportunity. Cryptocurrency mining has existed for many years, but this is not the only way to profit. Other investment options are available. For example, Optioment is an excellent investment fund, which allows you to deposit your bitcoins on a deposit and receive a weekly percentage.
For those who do not know what lightcoin and other cryptocurrencies are, you first need to familiarize yourself with the blockchain technology of distributed storage of records. Understanding how this works is key.
The purpose of this review is to provide information that you may need to make a decision about investing in lightcoin. Including information about the history of this cryptocurrency, its differences from bitcoin and why people invest in it.
What is lightcoin
Litecoin (LTC) is a decentralized virtual currency, i.e. no central authority is behind it. It is a list of open source transactions that are stored on many computers around the world. To make changes to a book or add a block to a chain, most nodes must agree on the change. Logging and updating requires a graphics processor and RAM. The reward for consumed computing power is distributed in lightcoins.
This is the same cryptocurrency as bitcoin. Litecoin was created as a sub-currency for the latter. Many call it silver, and Bitcoin - gold. Mostly it happened because Litecoin is technically very similar to its predecessor.
History of creation
Like Ethereum, lightcoin was created because someone wanted to improve the Bitcoin protocol, but they were not allowed to do it. He appeared on GitHub in October 2011. Its author is Charlie Lee. His goal was to improve the technology of distributed registries, so he cloned the main Bitcoin client and made several updates. The lightcoin cryptocurrency gained fame as a silver bitcoin for the reason that its creator wanted it to develop along with its predecessor, and not replace it.
After the launch of the network, the currency experienced many exponential bursts of value growth. The most significant began in 2017. The price of lightcoin increased from $ 4 to $ 250 (more than 61 times). In August, Litecoin reached a market capitalization of a total of $ 2 billion. And in just 2 months, it reached 3 billion US dollars. At the beginning of January 2018, the market capitalization of the currency at its price of $ 294 and 54.7 million units in circulation amounted to about $ 14 trillion. The maximum possible number of lightcoins is 84 million. This means that only so many coins will ever be created.
In May 2017, the Litecoin network supports the SegWit protocol. This soft change has basically accelerated the small transactions that occur on the network. SegWit has been implemented in other cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin, Vertcoin and Digibyte.
The first Lightning Network transaction in the Litecoin network was carried out the same month that SegWit was implemented. A transfer of 0.00000001 LTC from Zurich to San Francisco was completed in 1 second.
Why is digital cryptocurrency needed?
What is laycoin from a layman's point of view? This is a decentralized peer-to-peer digital cryptocurrency that can be used for anything: from buying a cup of coffee to paying bills on the Internet. But why did the need to resort to alternative means of payment arise where there is an opportunity to take advantage of traditional ones?
First of all, in comparison with credit cards, bank transfers, etc., the commission on lightcoin transactions is a penny. All transactions are recorded in a distributed public register called blockchain.It is a list of all previous records or transactions that have ever been made. Thus, using a chain of blocks, you can trace all operations.
This is an instant and time-saving payment method that no one controls. It is impossible to prohibit, because the user has full control over their funds. The reliability of operations is determined using mathematical calculations and, therefore, is not centralized.
Thus, digital cryptocurrency has many advantages, but its diversity is so great that it becomes difficult to decide which one is better. So why it is worth choosing Litecoin?
Why does lightcoin have a bright future?
Any cryptocurrency is evaluated according to several criteria, such as the degree of prevalence, the prospects for the development of technology in the coming years, what its development team is and what people are behind the project. Each of these points deserves separate consideration.
Prevalence
Those who have followed the history of cryptocurrencies know that lightcoin has always been among the leaders in terms of market capitalization. He currently holds 7th place.
The purchase and withdrawal of lightcoins is carried out on all major exchanges. Like Bitcoin, this cryptocurrency has a very good reputation. In the past, there were many coins that were included in the list of the top 10, but only the most worthy survived. Litecoin is one of them. He is generally accepted, and people believe in him. In addition, the dynamics of lightcoin are encouraging - the number of transactions conducted with his participation is constantly increasing.
Technical perspective
Lightcoin cryptocurrency in its network allows instant transactions of the Lightning Network and cryptocurrency swaps, which is a revolutionary achievement.
Lightning Network is a second-level protocol that allows you to send funds faster and cheaper, without waiting for confirmation of the blockchain. The technology allows millions and billions of operations per second, which is of utmost importance.
An interblock swap provides the ability to perform chain operations without the help of a third party or cryptocurrency exchanges, which further reduces the cost of transactions and increases their security. Currently, only lightning swaps between bitcoin and lightcoin are supported.
In addition, confidential transactions are being developed.
Thus, from a technical perspective, the lightcoin forecast looks good.
Differences from Bitcoin
Although lightcoin is an offshoot of the main Bitcoin client, the two currencies have some differences. Minor changes concern the graphical user interface and bug fixes. The deeper differences between the two protocols provide a better understanding of what lightcoin is. These include:
Faster transaction confirmation. If the Bitcoin network takes 10 minutes to process a block and add it to the chain, then for a lightcoin this time is 2.5 minutes. This allows for faster operations 4 times faster. Theoretically, this also makes the lightcoin more secure against hacker attacks.
For certification of transactions “scrypt" is used. Since it is a proof of work, adding a block to a blockchain requires not only processing power, but also RAM. Scrypt also makes it difficult to run multiple instances of the application. This implementation counteracts the impact of ASIC (Application-Specific Integrated Circuit) technology. The consequence of this is that the special equipment used to mine bitcoins is not so effective for lightcoins.
This cryptocurrency allows the release of more of its units. If the maximum possible number of bitcoins is 21 million, then the limit for lightcoin is 84 million.
Should I invest?
Everyone who follows the world of cryptocurrencies has seen a huge surge in the price of bitcoin over the past year.The same thing happened once with a lightcoin, and should be repeated again. Cryptorevolution is currently underway, and this is the best time for action. Millions of people invest in cryptocurrency around the world. And Litecoin is among the top ten of them, therefore it is one of the most promising investment options.
Lightcoin is not as high as Bitcoin. As of the beginning of January 2018, the price of 1 MTC was about 17 thousand US dollars. Many can not afford such a huge investment, so they do not have the opportunity to benefit from an increase in the value of the currency. The lightcoin rate is much lower. Its price is $ 280. This makes this cryptocurrency more accessible for ordinary people who want to invest in this technology. Many small companies, family-owned enterprises, and individuals prefer to buy lightcoins. This is a smart move in anticipation of the next inevitable surge in prices.
Thus, the answer to the question of whether to invest in lightcoin is positive. And now is the best time, since no one knows when the rapid growth of this cryptocurrency will begin.
Statistical history
If you look at the chart, you can see that the dynamics of the lightcoin are very consistent and have low volatility. LTC is less prone to significant fluctuations compared to other cryptocurrencies.
According to users, the future of any project depends on its leaders and the development team. Charlie Lee was very active on social networks and spoke very frankly about the problems he was facing. According to many, he knows what he is doing and is working on the future of cryptocurrency. So the lightcoin forecast in the investment plan looks very promising.
What does Charlie Lee think about Bitcoin?
The creator of lightcoin is a staunch supporter of bitcoin. He previously collaborated with Coinbase, where he began to develop a new cryptocurrency. Unlike Bitcoin Cash, Charlie Lee did not want to compete with Bitcoin. For him, it was entertainment. Competition, and especially the intention to become the next bitcoin, was never part of Charlie's plans. According to him, if the main cryptocurrency does not survive, then no other can do it. He intends to make transactions faster and cheaper, without competing with bitcoin.
How to mine lightcoins
There are several programs that allow you to do this. The simplest one is the skrypt version of GUIMiner. This is a simple Windows application that lets you get started almost immediately. True, while this is an alpha version, so you need to make sure that it does not hang. Before mining a lightcoin, you need to make a lot of settings that increase or decrease the performance of the software. For example, using the parallelism of 8096 streams with two GPU streams in the Radeon 7870 provides up to 380 cache / s, but the same card allows you to achieve a speed of 400-450 cache / s. You can increase the speed by about 50-60 khesh / s by using CPU cores. With an efficient central processor, this can be done if the complexity is not very high.
However, in deciding the chain, it’s better to join the pool and not rely on luck. This will ensure fair compensation in proportion to the effort. There are several pools that support lightcoin that you can read about before deciding which one to use.
Wallet Creation
Once a certain amount of coins has been earned, they should be put into the wallet as soon as possible (in some places the commission is less if you wait longer). It is enough to download the lightcoin client from the main website of the developer, and as soon as the application updates the blockchain, the deposit will become visible. After that, you can encrypt it and create a backup. This must be done, because no one will help if the hard drive is erased and information about the wallet is lost.
Finally
Litecoin is a very promising cryptocurrency.Mainly because it was built on the same software as Bitcoin. Whenever there is a surge in the price of MTC, after some time the price of lightcoin also increases. This is why many are considering investing in this cryptocurrency. Its low price is also a huge marketing advantage. In addition, it is impressive that Litecoin transactions complete almost 4 times faster than Bitcoin transactions.