Don’t be deterred! We’ll get into the specifics of these differences below and also have a look at how these factors contributed to Litecoin’s success as a more “spendable” cryptocurrency.
Although Lee is something of a polarizing entity in the cryptosphere, it’s worth hearing what he has to say about the cryptocurrency he invented.
The current average transaction fee for Litecoin, at the time of writing, is just $0.04.
To be clear, this would mean one organization could plausibly be processing more than 1/10 of all the Bitcoin blocks and, in the opinion of many, this goes against a philosophy at the very core of cryptocurrencies: decentralization.
This is where Litecoin’s hashing algorithm comes in: Lee went with Scrypt because the algorithm is less susceptible to ASIC mining.
Transactions on the Litecoin network also happen faster than those on the Bitcoin network, on average every 2.5 minutes as opposed to 10 minutes for Bitcoin.
While supporters of Ether might be quick to point out that there are proposed monetary policies in the works aimed at curbing inflation over time without relying on a supply cap, nothing concrete has materialized yet, as Ethereum’s monetary policy is in flux.
As touched on briefly in the introduction, a contributing factor to the anti-Litecoin sentiment surrounds its founder Lee, who sold all of his LTC holdings in December 2017 when the coin was nearing its all-time high of $310.
As per contributors, this perspective stems primarily from so-called “Bitcoin Maximalists” – BTC supporters who believe the Bitcoin network provides any and everything that investors want or need in a digital currency.
Perhaps at first glance, there’s some truth to that.