Bitcoin is one of the thousands of cryptocurrencies available for purchase today. While Bitcoin is the most valuable, and the most popular, it’s not the only cryptocurrency worth investing in.
Altcoins are essentially any cryptocurrency besides Bitcoin. If Bitcoin is the standard then all other cryptos are alternatives or altcoins.
Litecoin was one of the first altcoins available on the open market. It launched in 2011, just two years after Bitcoin.
Wondering what exactly Litecoin is, and where to buy Litecoin so you can start enjoying the value and utility offered by this classic crypto? Read on below to find out now.
Litecoin vs. Bitcoin
If Bitcoin is gold then Litecoin is silver. Litecoin’s founder modeled Litecoin after Bitcoin, after noticing that Bitcoin has certain utility limitations.
Today, Bitcoin is primarily used as a store of value. Many people use it to hedge against inflation. They are buying and holding it, limiting the number of transactions, since transactions with Bitcoin are slow and cumbersome.
But Litecoin seeks to solve this. The creator of Litecoin, Charlie Lee, a formal Google engineer, copied the original code for Bitcoin since all code is open-source.
The idea behind Litecoin was to be the “light” version of Bitcoin, that you can use for much faster transactions.
Charlie Lee copied Bitcoin’s code and altered it slightly. This makes it very similar to Bitcoin, but with a few key upgrades. Blocks generate much faster than Bitcoin’s 10-minute blocks.
Like Bitcoin, Litecoin has a limited supply. But Litecoin’s supply is about four times as much as Bitcoin’s, sitting at around 84 million.
Benefits of Litecoin
The biggest benefit of Litecoin is its speed. Speed comes from how fast blocks are created. Blocks on the blockchain are where transactions are stored. Once a block fills with transactions and completes verification, your transaction goes through.
With so many Bitcoin transactions processing every second, all fighting for the same block space, the network gets congested.
Litecoin solves this by creating blocks four times faster than Bitcoins.
With greater transaction speed, you can use Litecoin as a currency, to actually buy and sell things, as opposed to Bitcoin, which is primarily used as a store of value.
Where to Buy Litecoin
Wondering where to buy Litecoin, and where to sell Litecoin? You can purchase Litecoin on almost every cryptocurrency exchange that you can find Bitcoin on, such as Virgo for those in Canada, or Coinbase in the US.
It’s also one of the cryptocurrencies that you can commonly purchase with a crypto ATM. Most crypto ATMs focus on Bitcoin, but Litecoin is one of a handful of supplementary tokens offered.
If you are looking for a more creative way to get Litecoin, it can be mined as Bitcoin can. But Litecoin mining isn’t as energy-intensive, so the barrier to entry is much lower.
Ride the Next Big Wave
Now that you know what Litecoin is, and where to buy Litecoin, it’s time to start investing. The sooner you buy in, the sooner you get to enjoy the next big wave of gains.
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