Crypto Academy Week 9 || Homework Post for Prof. @yohan2on || Altcoins Part1

Hello Steemians this is my homework task for prof. @yohan2on on Litecoin, hope you enjoy it.

Little Background on Litecoins

source

Litecoins fall into the category of what is referred to as Altcoins. Since the arrival of Bitcoin in 2009, many other cryptocurrencies has emerged in the blockchain market, with what they term as a better offer when compared to Bitcoin as it relates to scalability, speed or fees. Of such coins is Litecoin.

Litecoins was launched in 2011, by Charles Lee an ex-google employee. He believed that the Bitcoin code had lots of flaws as it relates to its inability to speed up transactions, the manner in which it is mined, and it's scalability ( it's ability to run more transactions in a second).
Now for Charles Lee to bring about the changes he wanted, he had to create a lighter version of Bitcoin, and in order to achieve this he carried out a Hard Fork(kind of changing the protocol).

What is Litecoins (LTC)

It's a peer to peer digital or cryptocurrency and also an open source software project.
Technically, it's closely identical with Bitcoin, because it was an early Bitcoin spinoff. It makes the use of open source cryptographic protocol (writing in codes) to create and transfer digital coins.
Just like other cryptos on the blockchain technology, it has no central authority running it.

How Litecoin Work

It involves the creation and transfer of digital coins as stated earlier through the use of an open source cryptographic protocol, that runs in a blockchain technology.

Transaction Speed of Litecoin.

Litecoin blocks are generated four times faster than Bitcoin and also has four times more on the number of coins in circulation (84 million).
It also processes transactions faster and at a higher number during the same period.

Litecoins Mining.

One of the incentives for mining Litecoins, is that the very first miner to successfully verify a block is rewarded with 50 litecoins
However, the number of litecoins awarded for the said task decreases with time.
It's block mining time is two and half minutes, unlike Bitcoin that is ten minutes.
It was halved in 2015, which will continue at an interval until the 84,000,000th litecoins are mined.

Unlike Bitcoin, Litecoin can be mined with ordinary off the shelf machines (computers). However, the more the machine's capacity, the more the chance the miner earns something of value.

Advantages of Litecoin

Decentralized
Litecoin uses scrypt as it's hashing algorithm which differs from Bitcoin's SHA-256 hashing algorithm. Which makes it easier to use computer processing power and memory to run it's hashing calculations thus, a user can mine with non specialized computers. This perhaps makes Litecoin a potentially less centralized than Bitcoin, since little resources are needed to be part of the network.

Faster than Bitcoin
Litecoin blocks are generated every 2.5 minutes, while Bitcoin is 10 minutes per block addition. This makes Litecoin a top choice for sending money between exchanges for faster and cheaper transactions.

Availability
Litecoins are four times more than Bitcoins once all the coins are mined

Spam Resistant
Spamming Litecoin network is unattractive because it costs a lot more to spam when compared to Bitcoin.

Disadvantages of Litecoin

Superiority of other cryptocurrencies
For few years now, Litecoin has been losing its ground interms of value as it relates to fiat currency.

Lack of Scaling
Cryptos like Steem and Stellar has increased scaling capacity for possible wider use.
Example, Steem can do well over 180,000 transactions in a second now, compare it to Litecoin's little 14 to 28 in a second.

Low Payment Acceptance
Just like other cryptos, very few product or service providers accept payment in Litecoin.

Legal Problems
Cryptos are now facing strict restrictions and regulations in many of the countries in the world.

In Summery.
Litecoin is an Altcoin designed to be the Silver side of the Bitcoin's gold.
It is a faster way to send smaller payments that requires a faster confirmation time.
Litecoin uses scrypt as it's hashing algorithm.

Cc:-
@yohan2on
@kouba01