What The Hell Is Litecoin?

A Cryptocurrency

When I first heard of litecoin without really knowing what it was, I thought to myself - if bitcoin is made of gold, a different currency had to be made of silver. That cryptocurrency is known as “Litecoin.”  Well, Litecoin is a peer-to-peer Internet currency that enables instant payments to anyone in the world. It differs from its parent Bitcoin in that it can be efficiently mined with consumer-grade hardware. Litecoin provides faster confirmations (targeted at every 2.5 minutes on average) and uses memory-hard, scrypt-based mining to target the CPUs and GPUs most people already have. 

The Litecoin network is scheduled to produce four times as many currency units as Bitcoin. One of the aims of Litecoin was to provide a mining algorithm that could run at the same time, on the same hardware used to mine bitcoins. With the rise of specialized ASICs for Bitcoin, Litecoin continues to satisify these goals. It is unlikely for FPGA or ASIC mining to take over Litecoin until the currency is widely used. Although the demand for litecoin isn’t there yet, it sure is second to bitcoin in the world of cryptography and it’s popularity is now on the increase. 

Feel free to open an on online wallet with Bitcoin Exchange (BTC-e). You can also choose to mine for it directly using any of the developed programs designed for mining and to serve as a wallet here.  Litecoin Core is maintained by the Litecoin Core development team. This wallet is the pillar of the Litecoin p2p transaction network. It is referred to as a "full node" and once installed synchronizes with the network and joins it to relay transactions to other nodes. Due to Litecoin’s use of the script algorithm, devices made for mining Litecoin are more complicated to create and more expensive to produce than they are for bitcoin. Well the good news is that Litecoin miners are widely available today. The Litecoin mining devices will produce 84 million coins which is 4 times as many bitcoin that will be produced by bitcoin miners. 

Note:Always backup your wallet.dat file after the installation on a secondary media such as a USB drive. This will protect you from any problems you may encounter in the future. If you send and receive a lot of transaction, you must make regular backups. You can backup your wallet using File/Backup menu.