For years, financial experts lauded Bitcoin (BTC -15.05 percent) as the gold of the cryptocurrency world. While Litecoin (LTC -15.05 percent) dubs the silver.
The connection is apt: just as the gold has surpassed silver in recent years, Bitcoin has outpaced Litecoin. A $10,000 investment in Bitcoin in 2013 would grow to $886,000 now. Whereas Litecoin would grow to approximately $232,000 today.
Despite Litecoin’s appeal as a medium of exchange for money and transactions, it has underperformed. So, can you rely on the world’s 15th largest cryptocurrency to help you expand your investment portfolio?
Exceptional Usage
Litecoin is well-known for its blazingly quick transaction speed. In comparison to Bitcoin, the network can handle up to 56 transactions per second. Furthermore, transaction costs are often a few cents. As opposed to a few dollars with the latter (which can skyrocket during peak network demand amid bouts of speculation).
Litecoin blocks take 2 1/2 minutes to verify, while Bitcoin blocks take 10 minutes to verify. A Litecoin transaction uses 3% of the energy a Bitcoin transaction does.
Over 3,000 companies and stores accept Litecoin, compared to 7,300 that take Bitcoin. Furthermore, Litecoin features on practically every cryptocurrency exchange. Consumers may move Litecoin from one exchange to the next with ease. They may also use it to buy other altcoins or cryptocurrencies than Bitcoin.
Fixing the Critical Flaw
Because its main capability was making uni-dimensional peer-to-peer electronic payments. Litecoin trailed behind the rest of the blockchain sector for a while. However, it is catching up after others have gone ahead of it.
Global miners agreed earlier this year to modernize Bitcoin’s outdated system and add smart-contract functionality via the Taproot update, due to deploy in November. Once Taproot is operational, users will be able to buy and sell nonfungible tokens, use decentralized applications (dapps), trade altcoins on decentralized exchanges, and more.
Ethereum has been the current “reserve currency” for such transactions in recent years (ETH -0.88 percent). Ethereum, for example, now processes $294.8 million in smart contracts (self-executing agreements) every day across 2,841 dapps. As a result, there is a lot of potentials for Bitcoin to disrupt the market.
Litecoin, on the other hand, has the potential to catch up to Bitcoin since its creators choose to upgrade the currency. The Litecoin Foundation announced OmniLite, a technology built on top of the Litecoin network, on September 7. Smart contracts, nonfungible tokens, and decentralized tokens will deploy using OmniLite, with transactions notarized on the Litecoin ledger.
In addition, third-party providers like Wanchain have made Litecoin smart contracts compatible with the Ethereum Virtual Machine, however usage is still modest.
Litecoin’s Hope
Developers are currently working on a new and interesting feature. Litecoin inventor Charlie Lee stated in an interview last year that he wants to improve the network’s anonymity by obfuscating transactions on its ledger. The change would allow Litecoin to tackle the problem that Bitcoin faces: each transaction has less privacy than a cash transaction.
Users who want to make transactions without fear of being followed by crypto analytics organizations have been flocking to privacy currencies like Monero and Pirate Chain in recent years.
Overall, Litecoin is establishing itself in a hypercompetitive cryptocurrency market and evolving into something more valuable. For investors looking to put their money into altcoins, this makes it a desirable holding.
