As of the evening of October 31st bitcoin is trading at over $6,000 Canadian while Litecoin is trading well over $90 dollars Canadian. When issued Bitcoin had virtually no value. In April of 2010 on the now defunct BitcoinMarket.com the bitcoin traded at 0.003. On May 22 of 2010 two pizzas were bought in Jacksonville Florida for a cool 10,000 bitcoins. Whoever sold the pizzas will now be a multi-millionaire if he or she kept the bitcoins.
Litecoin too has shared in the incredible rise in value of some cryptocurrencies of late. A recent Forbes article says about litecoin: “The cryptocurrency reached $70.24(US) today, roughly 1,520% higher than its price of $4.33 at the start of the year, according to CoinMarketCap.” Those speculators buying litecoin early in the year have done very well! The astounding price increases may suffer a steep dropoff in the future but right now there is no sign of that happening.
As with bitcoin, litecoin(LTC) is a peer-to-peer cryptocurrency based on open source software. Creation and transfer of litecoin is based on an open crytographic protocol. It is not managed by any central authority or third party, a reason many of the early developers wanted to develop the coins. Some were libertarian. While based on bitcoin technology litecoin was the first to adopt such innovations as the Segregated Witness and Lightning Network. These innovations allow litecoin to complete many more transactions in a given time than bitcoin. Litecoin also has many more coins than bitcoin and hence is unlikely to reach bitcoin in value. Litecoin is unlikely to experience the bottlenecks that bitcoin has as the trade in bitcoin increases exponentially. Litecoin has almost zero transaction costs and its payments happen about four times as fast as bitcoin.
Litecoin was released on October 7, 2011 by Charlie Lee, who is a former Google employee. Litecoin was a fork off the Bitcoin Core Client. This is not the only fork in Bitcoin. On August 1, bittcoin split into classic bitcoin (BTC) and Bitcoin Cash (BCH). However, bitcoin continued its phenomenal rise in price. Although Bitcoin Cash’s value is far below that of bitcoin, as of two days ago it was still well above $600 dollars US and much more than litecoin.
Unlike the person(s) Sakoshi Nakamoto behind the development of bitcoin whose identity has never been decisively established and remains a mystery, Charlie Lee is well known and often talks to the press as in the interview below.
Lee sees bitcoin as being used for small transactions. Litecoin he argues would be better for smaller transactions because it is very quick and can handle huge volumes. Many involved with cryptocurrencies take an excited even evangelical tone when talking about the issue. Lee is very matter of fact with his answers being straightforward and informative. He says that many cryptocurrencies will not play any significant role in finance but will act more like tokens. He mentions Dogecoin as an example. However, as the Whopper Coin shows tokens can have a key role to play in loyalty programs. It remains to be seen if Litecoin will continue to do well even after the creation of Bit Cash.
Lee sees regulation of currencies by the government as a positive overall. He sees regulation as a way of ensuring that scammers are filtered out of the area. This view contrasts with some others who see any government regulation as a means of controlling a system that is meant to avoid government control
