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Manage your Litecoin wisely!
Learn how to setup Atomic Wallet to send, receive, exchange and buy LTC.
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Litecoin (LTC) represents a Bitcoin fork that features faster block creation speed, lower fees and increased total supply. The project was founded in 2011 by Charlee Lee, a real and active person, unlike Bitcoin’s Satoshi Nakamoto. The Litecoin project became one of the leading cryptocurrencies on the market. As of writing, the Litecoin market capitalization takes the 7th place in the world.
Litecoin was born as a Bitcoin hard fork that resolves Bitcoin issues, such as scalability and high fees. To achieve this, Charlee Lee took the Core code of Bitcoin protocol and made his own improvements, he decreased the block finding limitations to 2.5 minutes (in Bitcoin, it takes 10), used other hashing algorithm called "S-crypt" that brings new requirements to miners. The key to success were cheaper transactions and easier mining.
At first, Litecoin was a fork of Bitcoin Core client and was planned as a “silver” bitcoin, like a smaller brother that will have more accelerated block creation speed and which can support a bigger transactions values with fewer fees when compared to the Bitcoin. Within 3 years, Litecoin has become the second most popular altcoin on the market and had one of the biggest capitalization value reaching top 10 positions on the coinmarketcap rating.
The currency was created to handle a great value of transactions and is based on SegWit(Segregated Witness) and Lightning Network technologies. SegWit allows to greatly increase capacity of the block size by detaching digital signature from the block. Blocks in Litecoin Network created 4x time faster than in Bitcoin blockchain (2.5 minutes to 10 comparing with Bitcoin). The Lightning Network allows users to manage cryptocurrency without making any changes in the blockchain.
Mining: LTC uses a Scrypt algorithm which determines the process of new blocks creation. Comparing to SHA-256 it’s more affordable for individual miners and it's hash rate is lower. Also, it's ASIC secured protocol, that prevents large mining pools from mining Litecoin. For now, a reward for each block is 25 LTC. It halved every 4 years. The total amount of LTC that is planned to be issued is 84 mln.
Hard fork is a process that implies modification of a program code of a blockchain. In case the hard fork is accepted by a community unanimously, it is successful. In case the hard fork brings controversies, the blockchain may split. In the Litecoin case, the blockchain with its new rules got separated from the original Bitcoin blockchain without any backward compatibility.
Let’s say you have two ledgers: an old one and the new one. All records will be copied and transferred from the old to the new one with one main rule. If you want to interact with a new ledger, you must have the update installed.
The blocks on the pre-forked blockchain will be copied to the new version. That's it. You may ask, what happens to those who had funds on their addresses before the hardfork? They are lucky ones! Their accounts will be doubled.
The way a fork works is instead of creating a totally new cryptocurrency (and blockchain) starting at block 0, a fork just creates a duplicate version that shares the same history.
Litecoin is not the least Bitcoin fork. There are also Doge, Bitcoin Cash, Bitcoin Gold, Dash and many other cryptos.
Litecoin is one of the best cryptocurrencies to invest in, il you are looking for something outside of Bitcoin or Ethereum. You might also want to look for a wallet to manage your Litecoins. Litecoin is supported by plenty of wallets, both custodial and non-custodial. Atomic Wallet supports Litecoin as well. Moreover, with our wallet, you can manage LTC, exchange it, buy it with your bank card, and even swap it using Atomic Swaps. And all this in one comprehensive and clear wallet interface!
With Atomic Wallet, only you have control over your funds. Private keys are encrypted in your device and never leave it.
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